Studying real-time traffic in multi-hop networks using the EMANE emulator: capabilities and limitations

In this paper, we provide an open-source software emulator setup for MANETs and study its fidelity in providing reliable performance estimates for real-time traffic. We emulate the IEEE 802.11 MAC/PHY (DCF) using the EMANE software emulator deployed on a cluster and run experiments for different multi-hop wireless scenarios. As an instance, we study the performance of real-time streaming media over a mesh network supported by OLSR. We also use the setup to analyze the impact of the wireless network on the self-similarity of the traffic.