A wireless LAN device model for high fidelity software emulation

Physical systems and simulators are in a tradeoff relationship as wireless LAN evaluation environment. Number of physical machines, field limitations, reproducibility of radio propagation and fidelity to behavior of physical systems are challenging issues of wireless LAN evaluation. In this paper, we propose High Fidelity Emulation Environment (HiFEE) to solve the tradeoff relationship. We create simulation nodes with virtual machines to improve fidelity to physical systems. In addition, we implement a virtual wireless LAN device in a virtual machine to achieve device-level emulation. HiFEE reduced the gap between throughput of a physical system and of a simulator by 43.1%.