A Framework for Multidimensional Measurements on an Experimental WiMAX Testbed

A major difficulty in the design, study, and implementation of wireless protocols and applications is the multitude of nondeterministic factors (e.g. interference, weather conditions, competing traffic) that can affect their performance. For this reason, testbeds that enable researchers to quantify these influences have become increasingly essential in the wireless research community. The growing sophistication of wireless testbeds and the wide array of services they can provide to researchers have advanced the field tremendously.

Toward this end, we present an early implementation of an instrumentation and measurement framework that we have deployed on an open-access 802.16e wireless research testbed at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. We have created a set of tools to allow experimenters to routinely collect measurements of environmental conditions during experiment runtime. These tools integrate high volumes of multidimensional measurement data from a diverse array of sources, including measurements from software defined radio peripherals, sensors, and network device drivers. With this, we aim to give researchers the ability to conduct rigorous and repeatable over-the-air experiments. We also foresee potential applications for this framework beyond its use in experiments, such as in long-term testbed monitoring.