An standard testing framework is needed to satisfactorily validate mobile ad hoc network (MANET) protocol implementations and carry out comparison studies of different approaches. Research groups have employed dissimilar methodologies in experimentation and no common testing framework is available to the MANET research community. Furthermore, testbed experimentation faces the challenge of creating reproducible scenarios that are not only expensive in use of resources but also difficult to achieve. This paper presents MANET testbed manager (MTM), a system for setting up testbed scenarios for MANET protocols. MTM makes available an integrated framework for control, experimentation and visualization and relies on emulation of elements of a wireless mobile network that are difficult to manipulate, such as the position of the nodes, mobility patterns and energy consumption. MTM's goal is to offer a highly-flexible and low-cost testing environment for protocol validation to fill the gap between simulation and testbed experimentation. © 2005 IEEE.