A multi-homing extension of wireless node implementation in NS-2

Due to the rapid growth of wireless communication, it is now believed that wireless devices with multiple interface support will highly increase in the near future. In the research community of Network Simulator, there has recently been quite a large interest in extending the current wireless node implementation so as to be able to include more than one radio interface to work simultaneously. We focus our efforts on the extension of multi-homing ability of ns-2, which has been the most used network simulator in wireless network research. Multi-homing here is defined as the ability of a single end-point to support multiple IP addresses by the use of multiple interfaces. The ns-2 simulation environment is a flexible tool for network engineers to investigate how various protocols perform with different configurations and topologies. However, the support for wireless and mobile networking in ns-2 is monolithic and not entirely consistent with basic design principles so that it makes it quite difficult, if not impossible, to extend a multi-homing support based on current mobilenode design. This paper describes how we extend the ns-2 framework to include support for an imititated wireless multi-homed node.