Performance evaluation of nsclick simulator for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In order to evaluate the behavior and performance of protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) both simulation and test bed are often used. The simulation is used in first stages and the test bed is used in final stages of development process when real-world tests are needed. Click Modular Router is known as an efficient software architecture for building flexible and configurable routers for test bed. However, when moving from simulation to test bed, source code usually needs to be reim-plemented. As a result, there must be a cost of maintaining two completely different code-bases. The tool nsclick was introduced to address this issue. It is constructed by embedding the Click Modular Router inside of the NS-2 network simulator. The source code with nsclick may run both on actual systems as well as under simulator with minor modifications. In this paper, we provided an intensive performance comparison between nsclick and NS-2 by carefully implementing a broadcast algorithm in both simulators. In addition, we designed and implemented an efficient jitter element in nsclick. Simulation results show that nsclick is a useful and effective tool for evaluating protocols in MANETs. The results also indicate that our jitter element can significantly reduce packet collision and thus improve performance of nsclick.