Section: New Results

Experimenting

Participants : Nathalie Mitton, Julien Vandaele.

One of the goal of the FUN research group is to validate through experimentations and to provide tools for this purpose. Therefore, the FIT platform is deployed, together with a set of tutorials [37] . Nevertheless, we are aware that using testbed platforms for validation is already a great step but it can not satisfy all needs. This is why we also investigate alternatives as emulation. In [28] , [32] for instance, we propose a specifically designed experimental setup using a relatively small number of nodes forming a real one-hop neighborhood used to emulate any real WSN. The source node is a fixed sensor, and all other sensors are candidate forwarding neighbors towards a virtual destination. The source node achieves one forwarding step, then the virtual destination position and neighborhood are adjusted. The same source is used again to repeat the process. The main novelty is to spread available nodes regularly following a hexagonal pattern around the central node, used as the source, and selectively use subsets of the surrounding nodes at each step of the routing process to provide the desired density and achieve changes in configurations. Compared to real testbeds, our proposition has the advantages of emulating networks with any desired node distribution and densities, which may not be possible in a small scale implementation, and of unbounded scalability since we can emulate networks with an arbitrary number of nodes. Finally, our approach can emulate networks of various shapes, possibly with holes and obstacles. It can also emulate recovery mode in geographic routing, which appears impossible with any existing approach.