Network-Scale Emulation of General Wireless Channels

This paper presents a framework for signal-level emulation of propagation effects over generalized fading channels at the scale of entire networks. Network emulation enables research into network- scale systems - which would otherwise be limited to low-fidelity network simulators and one-off field experiments - to use real radio hardware and realistic channel models. Our hardware and software architecture goes beyond previous work in that it supports real-time emulation of a very general and parametric class of channels, which includes vehicular (broadband mobile-to-mobile) and indoor channels in addition to classical stationary-to- mobile and stationary-to-stationary channels.