THE NETWORK PROTOCOL EVALUATION WITH THE HYBRID OPERATIONAL PROTOCOL EVALUATION TOOL

The Hybrid Operational Protocol Evaluation (HOPE) tool, allows users to: Compare performance metrics of various communication protocols against realistic operational scenarios Visualize motion and communication activities in a mobile network. Designing a distributed mobile communication architecture, which may involve hundreds of mobile nodes, requires the evaluation of various communication protocols. In order to select the appropriate protocol, each protocol's performance should be compared across realistic missions with different traffic profiles, terrain, and atmospheric conditions. The HOPE tool is a framework that combines terrain maps, simulation models of communication protocols, and link budget calculations. This framework allows communication protocol models from various simulations to be visualized on one user interface. The user interface allows a user to easily create, configure, and execute a scenario that includes 3D geographical map, network nodes, node motion and communication profiles. HOPE refines the result of the scenario execution with terrain and atmospheric conditions, visualizes the scenario execution over the 3D map, and provides the user with the scenario performance statistics. To ensure realism in urban environments HOPE extracts road coordinates from Google Maps web service and overlays them on 3D maps to ensure vehicles follow roads. HOPE is capable to execute and visualize more than one simulation model using different execution environments within one scenario;