Seawind: a Wireless Network Emulator .

Wide area wireless networks are being studied worldwide in order to provide better network service with good performance to customers. The Software Emulator for Analyzing Wireless Network Data Transfers (Seawind) is a real-time network simulator that allows researchers to measure the performance of real network applications over an emulated network that follows the user specified wireless network behavior model. Using an emulator in network performance tests has several benefits. It allows constructing and repeating specific test scenarios that are interesting to the researcher. The researcher has full control over the parameters affecting the network behavior and he can run performance tests on future networks that are not yet available for testing. By using emulator the performance tests are faster and cheaper to carry out than real field tests. A benefit of real-time emulation over simulators running in virtual time is that we can study the actual protocol implementations of different operating systems and applications.