With the growing availability of wireless networking environments, the need for advanced methods in performance analysis of wireless network protocols and applications has become more and more important.

Due to the many new effects introduced by mobility and wireless network characteristics, such as limited transmission range, dynamic topology, unreliable links and relatively low bandwidth compared to wired networks, protocols and applications must be developed which are able to effciently perform under these dynamic conditions.

In general, the real system in which the applications will be deployed is not available to the performance analyst, and alternatives are required that mimic the real system as precisely as possible in a laboratory scale environment.

One promising way to perform protocol and application evaluation is the method of emulation, which allows to execute applications and protocols in their original implementation, on top of a testbed infrastructure providing a virtual environment that is a comprehensive model of the original system.

In this thesis, we will develop new concepts concerning the emulation of mobile and ad hoc networks. We will investigate the different approaches that are candidates for a concrete realization, and chose an appropriate solution that will support the emulation of the physical and medium access layer of a wireless network protocol stack.

We provide the implementation of a prototype system which integrates the developed concepts and supports the emulation of mobile and ad hoc scenarios. Based on the prototype, we will show that we are able to analyze any protocol and application which resides above the MAC layer of the testbed system, by use of a concrete ad hoc routing protocol implementation.