Large scale MANET emulations using U.S. Army waveforms with application: VoIP

Large scale experimentation and analysis of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is an expensive and time consuming task. Even with the best planning, the environment at the time of the experiment is unpredictable, making large scale controlled experiments difficult to impossible to perform. At the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) we are using the EMANE (Extensible Mobile Ad-hoc Network Emulation) environment to supplement and extend live experiments in a controlled environment. Our emulation environment includes locally developed tools for real-time path loss calculations using the Longley-Rice irregular terrain model implemented on GPGPUs (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units). This real-time path loss calculation capability allows for the integration of virtual devices with live experiments and forces modeling and simulations. Live experiment integration is identified as one method to increase the perceived scale of the MANET to live participants and increase the repeatability of the experiment. This emulation system is currently being scaled to 1000s of CPU cores and emulated radios through the use of high performance computing assets and approaches. We will present this emulation platform in the context of the performance analysis of a MANET application, namely VoIP (Voice over IP).