The main activities leading towards a testbed validation of routing protocols for MANETs involve code development and experimentation. Because of the characteristics of such networks, these activities are commonly obstructed by the need of managing parameters inherently difficult to control in real situations, such as the position of the nodes or the starting residual energy of mobiles. This paper discusses a possible solution to the problem and presents an implementation of the proposal. The MANET testbed manager (MTM) is a system that allows setting up reproducible testbed scenarios useful for code development, initial validation and visualization. The main purpose of MTM is to simulate the main physical elements that can be found in a mobile network while allowing a MANET routing protocol operate concurrently being unaware of the underlying simulation. © 2006 Oxford University Press.