Evaluation of a Delay-Tolerant ICN Architecture

Simulation/emulation is key for early testing, assessment, and scalability evaluation of networking solutions for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). If the solution is highly configurable - such as ENCODERS, SRI's delay-tolerant information-centric networking (ICN) solution - this type of evaluation is crucial. For effective modeling of information flows, the test framework needs to: (1) allow repeatable execution of scenarios with different patterns of network traffic, operating in different mobility and network-usage contexts, (2) provide a rich simulated environment that can model virtually any network topology and mobility, with high-fidelity device models, and (3) support flexible large-scale simulation, with the option of using virtual machines that execute the same code that would be used on an actual device. We describe our evaluation framework and the results of using it to develop and evaluate ENCODERS.