Augmentation of Directional and Sector Antenna Support in NS2

Last two decades have witnessed a huge deployment of telecommunication infrastructure in order to enhance a wide range of social, political and economic factors. Unfortunately, a little effort put in setting up these vital infrastructures in the rural areas, especially of developing countries has resulted in marginalization. A viable solution to this problem is to use low cost and easily deployable WiFi-based Long Distance (WiLD) networks in extending Internet connectivity to the rural underserved areas. To cover larger areas point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links set up with directional and sector antennas respectively are commonly used. To study network protocols, open source Network Simulator 2 (NS2) is widely used in networking research. However, NS2 does not have any support for directional and sector antenna simulation. In this paper, we augment directional and sector antenna support in NS2.34. Four grid parabolic directional antenna models viz., AP240024, AP240027, AP240030, and AP240032 are added for simulating long distance point-to-point links. Various experiments conducted over the long distance simulated links validate the claims of the paper.