Detailed Simulation of Large-Scale Wireless Networks

In this paper, we present WiFra, a new framework for the detailed simulation of very large-scale wireless networks. WiFra is based on the parallel and distributed simulation approach and provides high scalability in terms of size of simulated networks and number of execution units running the simulation. In order to improve the performance of distributed simulation, additional techniques are proposed. Their aim is to reduce the communication overhead and to maintain a good level of load-balancing. Simulation architectures composed of low-cost Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware are specifically supported by WiFra. The framework dynamically reconfigures the simulation, taking care of the performance of each part of the execution architecture and dealing with unpredictable fluctuations of the available computation power and communication load on the single execution units. A fine-grained model of the 802.11 DCF protocol has been used for the performance evaluation of the proposed framework. The results demonstrate that the distributed approach is suitable for the detailed simulation of very-large scale wireless networks.