Data Dissemination in the Wild: A Testbed for High-Mobility MANETs

This paper investigates the problem of efficient data dissemination in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) with high mobility. A testbed is presented; which provides a high degree of mobility in experiments. The testbed consists of 10 autonomous robots with mobile phones mounted on them. The mobile phones form an IEEE 802.11g ad hoc network to communicate with each other. A dynamic network topology is assumed, where the mobile devices form a cooperative cluster in order to exchange data packets among each other. In our multimedia exchange scenario, the initial state is that one device carries all information, and the goal is to convey that information to all devices. A strategy is proposed that uses UDP broadcast transmissions and random linear network coding to facilitate the efficient exchange of information in the network. An application is introduced that implements this strategy on Nokia phones. The measurement results collected from the testbed are presented, and the performance of the proposed strategy is compared to a reference strategy that is based on TCP unicast connections.