Sniffing Out Correct Error Frame Model of ns-2 Simulator

JengFarn Lee and MengChang Chen

11th Communications and Networking Simulation Symposium (CNS 2008)
Ottawa, Canada, April 14-17 2008

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Summary

Network simulators such as ns-2, Qualnet and OPNET are popular in performance evaluations for network protocols and systems such that the correctness of these network simulators is critical to research community, especially for wireless networks as the physical evaluations are difficult to setup and conduct. In this work, we point out the incorrect simulation results of the current ns-2 implementation employed by numerous research works. The cause (called incorrect error frame presumption in this paper) is the incorrect handling of the frames from stations located between the carrier sense and transmission ranges of the receiver in two-ray ground propagation model. Although two-ray ground propagation model is a simplified physical model that does not consider cumulative interference and noise level, it is most common used model for wireless simulations. Moreover, this incorrect presumption is widely misused in the research community, and it affects the simulation results significantly. Therefore, it is worth mentioning and being clarified. We present a detailed probabilistic analysis of the problem to confirm the root cause. Then, we conduct simulations to show how the problem impacts the simulation results through MAC to application layers.

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