Laboratory-based mobile wireless testbeds such as MeshTest and the CMUWireless Emulator are powerful platforms that allow users to performcontrolled, repeatable, mobile wireless experiments in the lab.Unfortunately such systems can only accommodate 10-20 nodes in anexperiment. We have designed and built a system which uses softwarevirtualization and live migration to facilitate experiments involvinggeographically sparse networks with many multiples of the number ofphysical nodes available on such a testbed. Our system uses elements ofthe MeshTest testbed, as well as a new mobility management system whichcontrols the migration of virtual node images between wireless testbednodes and offline servers.
In this talk we will summarize how the MeshTest system works, themathematical problems associated with its implementation, and some pastexperiments. Then we will describe our current effort to build our newVirtualized MeshTest system, and describe some DTN erasure codingexperiments we plan to perform on the system.