# Experimentation with MANETs of Smartphones

## TL;DR

This paper introduces AdHocDroid, a framework enabling smartphones to form IP-level MANETs for experimentation, validated through performance tests and supporting standard applications and routing protocols.

## Contribution

The paper presents AdHocDroid, a novel Android package that creates configurable IP-level MANETs on smartphones, facilitating research and experimentation.

## Key findings

- AdHocDroid successfully creates functional MANETs on smartphones.
- The framework supports standard TCP/IP applications over ad-hoc networks.
- Performance evaluation shows acceptable network metrics and battery usage.

## Abstract

Mobile AdHoc NETworks (MANETs) have been identified as a key emerging technology for scenarios in which IEEE 802.11 or cellular communications are either infeasible, inefficient, or cost-ineffective. Smartphones are the most adequate network nodes in many of these scenarios, but it is not straightforward to build a network with them. We extensively survey existing possibilities to build applications on top of ad-hoc smartphone networks for experimentation purposes, and introduce a taxonomy to classify them. We present AdHocDroid, an Android package that creates an IP-level MANET of (rooted) Android smartphones, and make it publicly available to the community. AdHocDroid supports standard TCP/IP applications, providing real smartphone IEEE 802.11 MANET and the capability to easily change the routing protocol. We tested our framework on several smartphones and a laptop. We validate the MANET running off-the-shelf applications, and reporting on experimental performance evaluation, including network metrics and battery discharge rate.