A virtual network approach for testing wireless mesh in industrial process control

作者：Han Song^*; Zhu Xiuming; Song Jianping; Mok Aloysius K; Chen Deji; Nixon Mark; Pratt Wally; Gondhalekar Veena

来源：16th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2010, 2010-08-23 to 2010-08-25.

DOI：10.1109/RTCSA.2010.7

• Design philosophy
• Environmental factors
• In-buildings
• Industrial process control
• Physical equipment
• Standard testing
• Virtual devices
• Virtual networks
• Wired networks
• Wireless mesh
• Wireless transceiver

Unlike wired networks, the configuration and the behavior of wireless networks are heavily dependent on many environmental factors. While this makes it more difficult to build a wireless network testbed whose behavior is controllable, it also makes the availability of such a testbed all the more desirable. Indeed, the difficulties in building a good wireless mesh testbed belie the fact that most research work on mesh network performance is backed up only by computer simulations. In this paper, we present a practical design philosophy in which a realistic and controllable wireless mesh network testbed is built with a relatively small deployment of physical equipments by exploiting the idea of a virtual network. Specifically, we simulate a virtual network within the testbed and use one physical wireless transceiver to simulate multiple virtual devices. An observer who only reads the transmitted wireless messages will not be able to tell the difference from a real wireless mesh. Our approach has been adopted in a recent industry-standard testing suite, namely, Wi-HTest. In this paper, we shall discuss our experience in building Wi-HTest by applying the virtual network approach.

• 出版日期2010
• 单位University of Texas; The University of Texas