eBATMAN: An Emulator-BAsed Testbed for Studying Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Security

Abstract

Doing research on mobile ad hoc network (MANET) security involves several constraints, some of which are wireless environment's attributes, such as bandwidth and delay, and the correctness of network topology. Testing and evaluating using real wireless devices are costly and somehow impractical, so many tools have been developed in order to create media by which researchers can deeply investigate different aspects of network security. On software view, recently simulators gain much attention because they provide very detailed low-level models to network behaviors; however, they lack of some physical wireless characteristics. On the other hand, hardware view, emulators are presented to solve the shortcomings posed by simulators by providing a virtual wireless network at low level, and to support real code pieces that can be executed. In this paper, we propose a testbed supporting a highly realistic wireless environment for evaluation of MANET security. One of the features which best distinguishes our testbed from other is that it provides ability to emulate a MANET from layer 2 up while other ones cannot. Furthermore, our testbed integrates flexible configurability as well as deployment and it has effective mechanisms to generate different attacking scenarios. At last, the quality of our testbed is also shown in its ability to offer readiness in deploying various kinds of attack methods thus easier for us to evaluate jobs done.