Poster Abstract : SCORPION : A Heterogeneous Wireless Networking Testbed

During the last decade, the success and popularity of wireless standards such as IEEE 802.11 have drawn the attention of the research community to wireless networks. A great amount of effort has been invested into research in this area, most of which relies heavily on simulation and analysis techniques. However, simulations do not precisely control hardware interrupts, packet timing and real physical and MAC layer behaviors. As a result, simulation results need to be validated by real implementations, which is evident by the change in focus of research activities increasingly moving towards real implementations, including the deployment of testbeds as a main tool to analyze network protocol functionality. Under this context, we present an overview of SCORPION (Santa Cruz mObile Radio Platform for Indoor and Outdoor Networks), a heterogeneous wireless networking testbed that includes a variety of nodes ranging from ground vehicles to autonomous aerial vehicles. The purpose of SCORPION to is to deploy and investigate nascent networking protocols using a variety of mobile platforms utilizing structured as well as unstructured mobility patterns.