  Anonymous Dynamic Networks is a harsh computational environment due to
changing topology and lack of identifiers. Computing the size of the network, a
problem known as Counting, is particularly challenging because messages
received cannot be tagged to a specific sender. Previous works on Counting in
Anonymous Dynamic Networks do not provide enough guarantees to be used in
practice. Indeed, they either compute only an upper bound on the network size
that may be as bad as exponential, or guarantee only double-exponential running
time, or do not terminate, or guarantee only eventual termination without
running-time guarantees. Faster experimental protocols do not guarantee the
correct count. Recently, we presented the first Counting protocol that computes
the exact count with exponential running-time guarantees. The protocol requires
the presence of one leader node and knowledge of any upper bound Delta on the
maximum number of neighbors that any node will ever have. In the present work,
we complement the latter theoretical study evaluating the performance of such
protocol in practice. We tested a variety of network topologies that may appear
in practice, including extremal cases such as trees, paths, and continuously
changing topologies. We also tested networks that temporarily are not
connected. Our simulations showed that the protocol is polynomial for all the
inputs tested, paving the way to use it in practical applications where
topology changes are predictable. The simulations also provided insight on the
impact of topology changes on information dissemination. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first experimental study that shows the possibility of
computing the exact count in polynomial time in a variety of Anonymous Dynamic
Networks that are worse than expected in practice.
