Distributed Realtime Wireless Network Emulation for Multi-Robot and Multi-Link Setup Evaluation

Abstract

State-of-the-art robot deployments for rescue robotics typically involve more than one robot, each potentially equipped with multiple radio access technologies for redundancy. Evaluating and benchmarking such deployments with numerous robots and network communication links requires tools that scale well across these dimensions. This work builds on previous work that presented vSTING as a solution for emulating challenging network environments for single robots. The current work extends vSTING to include multi-robot and multi-link support, making it a pure software solution but distributed, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware. Furthermore, the resulting solution can be used in real-world applications to manage or limit network resources. In the first evaluation step, we validate the multi-robot and multi-link feature. Then, an exemplary validation of a basic multi-link solution in its early development stage is conducted by replaying a network environment recorded during a prior mission.