Enhancing Experimentation in Wireless Networks

Since the inception of the 802.11 standard in 1999, WLANs, which used to be exceptional, became a massive phenomena together with the evolution of portable devices. At the same pace, research on wireless networks, where both simulation and experimentation are used to validate protocols, has evolved rapidly. Nevertheless, the models used in this area were adapted from the wired paradigm, which has led to a significant gap between the simulated and the experimental results. Therefore, to validate wireless protocols or algorithms, wireless experimentation remains as an important resource. This thesis explores the improvements to experimentation on WLANs, from a methodological point of view. The main contributions of this thesis are: First, the new model for data abstraction to represent network events and aggregated data logs; second, the methodology to manage data in order to support a database model; and third the replacement of custom made processing scripts with data-oriented filter modules. These three key points converge to a proposal of a wireless experimentation methodology in order to attain reproductible experiments. We implement this methodology within a Wireless Experimentation Tool, and furthermore we show the improvement results through a wireless multicast experimentation use case.