VCU Thesis

Thesis "Development of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network for Collaborative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles"

The RAMS simulator simulates flight (feeds the ns-3 mobility model) and network behavior (ns-3). This infrastructure can simulate in faster-than-real-time. It validates that 802.11s mesh message hopping works and predicts loss. It does not examine latency. They use UDP. They do not need network namespaces because they unicast messages to specific IP addresses.

Messages pass between Wifi nodes using the ns-3 Wifi virtual network. Messages pass between the RAMS simulator and individual Wifi nodes using Unix Domain Sockets (UDSs). The RAMS simulator also uses a Pipe to communicate to ns-3.

UB-ANC Emulator

They use signals and slots to transmit between Micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs). MAVs signal netDataReady to transfer packets to ns-3. ns-3 uses the netSendData slot to transfer packets to MAVs. Actual messages are passed between MAVs and signals/slots via IPC. The MAV simulator additionaly signals globalPositionChanged to ns-3's mobility model. The UB-ANC and ns-3 are synchronized by having both use the real-time scheduler.

They use YANS to model Wifi 802.11b. At MAC they use 802.11 DCF. For network layer routing they use built-in optimized link state routing (OLSR) and ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV). Transport is UDP.

ns-3 generates PCAP files that can be examined using Wireshark.