Abstract: Software simulation and in-situ test analysis, theoretical analysis and other methods can be used for performance analysis and evaluation of ad hoc routing protocol. Due to the high cost of in-situ test analysis and the complicated experimental environment deployment, at present, the software simulation is the main method for ad hoc routing protocol performance evaluation, however, this method is not convincing for the study of ad hoc networks through practical application scenarios. Comparing the advantage and the disadvantage of the various methods, we propose a new ad hoc routing protocol performance evaluation method based on wired network: Adding various statistics probe into the application layer, network layer, link layer to collect performance data. In addition, we design and implement a visualization data acquisition and analysis platform, which can collect the performance data for graphical display and analysis and evaluation. This method not only makes up the influence of the sensitive factors such as operating system, system hardware, system design and communication environment, but also solves the problems appeared in in-situ test analysis, e.g. the performance data is not easy to be acquired, the cost is huge and the scene construction is complicated. At last, this paper compares the performance of three typical ad hoc network routing protocols by using the proposed performance data acquisition and evaluation method.

Key words: ad hoc network, wireless simulation over wired, data acquisition probe, VxWorks system, performance data acquisition and evaluation