A System Design of Tight Physical Integration for Large-Scale Vehicular Network Emulation

Abstract

Network emulation techniques are helpful to evaluate the operation and the performance of applications and protocols on network systems including vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). We have proposed a wireless network emulation environment using a wireless network tap device (wtap80211), a virtual wireless network device and provides interfaces that enables a network simulator to capture real IEEE 802.11 frames, transmission control information such as transmission power and frequency, and reception status information such as Receive Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and Basic Service Set (BSS). Therefore, with the emulation framework, a network simulator can imitate radio propagation and the mobility of network nodes. On the other hand, to fully exploit the emulation framework, monitoring and controlling a network system is important. Since the topology of VANET always change due to the mobility of vehicles, we need to oversee all network nodes to grasp the reachability of beacons sent by vehicles. In this paper, we design a network monitoring interface for a large-scale wireless network system focusing on V2V wireless networks. using wtap80211-based wireless network emulation framework and introduce mechanisms that improve the performance of network monitoring.