Measuring and Explaining Differences in Wireless Simulation Models

Network Simulation tools have played very significant role in wireless network research in the past decade. Compared to wired networks, there are a lot more parameters that effect the behavior of wireless networks. For reasons of simplicity and computational complexity, some details are abstracted out when implementing protocol models in network simulators. IEEE 802.11 has been the dominant protocol for the MAC and PHY layers of most wireless networks in practice. Subtle implementation variations in the 802.11 protocol result in largely divergent results when higher level protocols are simulated on top of the 802.11MAC. In this paperwe concentrate on these implementation details and show how these affect the behavior of the 802.11 MAC model in various simulators. We also identify the abstractions that result in the diverging behavior of the 802.11 MAC protocol model and try to compare those with reference to the IEEE specification.