A testbed for mobile networked computing

The rapid deployment of wireless access technology, along with the emergence of high speed integrated service networks, promises to provide users with ubiquitous access to multimedia information in the near future. We are building an experimental testbed system, SWAN (Seamless Wireless ATM Network), to mimic this emerging networking environment. Our wireless access network is organized according to a nanocellular design with base stations serving as a gateway for communication between the wired network and the mobile hosts in a cell. Normally, a mobile host sends and receives traffic through the base station in its current cell. But SWAN also supports direct ephemeral networking between a limited number of cooperating mobile hosts within a small domain. The heart of the testbed is a networking subsystem, FAWN (Flexible Adapter for Wireless Networking) that interfaces the standard PCMCIA bus to an RF modem. The FAWN interface is used with a PC or workstation connected to a wired backbone network or a portable device such as a laptop or palmtop computer. In addition, a user interface consisting of an LCD display, audio I/O, and a bar code reader has been built. When interfaced with FAWN this results in a portable wireless multimedia terminal.