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ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION
The deployment of wireless applications or protocols in the
context of Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), often re- Context
quires to step through a simulation phase. For the results During the last ten years, Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (or
of the simulation to be meaningful, it is important that the MANET) have become more and more popular. This still
model on which is based the simulator matches as closely as growing interest requires to adapt solutions from the tradi-
possible the reality. In this paper we present the simulation tional wired networks to the wireless environment (broad-
results of a straightforward algorithm using several popu- cast, routing, etc.). The deployment and the debugging of
lar simulators (OPNET Modeler, NS-2, GloMoSim). The wireless applications on a real network can be rather tire-
results tend to show that significant divergences exist be- some if large networks are considered (typically hundreds of
tween the simulators. This can be explained partly by the nodes). This is why simulation is an important tool in the
mismatching of the modelisation of each simulator and also sense that it can often help to improve or validate protocols.
by the different levels of detail provided to implement and All simulators provide a complete toolkit to the developers
configure the simulated scenarios. that enables metrics collection and various wireless network
diagnostics.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.1 [Computer Systems Organization]: Computer-
Accuracy of simulations results
Communication Networks—Distributed networks, Wireless There exists several popular simulators, such as OPNET
communication; D.2.8 [Software Engineering]: Metrics— [10] Modeler, NS-2 [9] or GloMoSim [2]. They all pro-
Performance measures; D.4.8 [Operating Systems]: Per- vide advanced simulation environments to test and debug
formance—Simulation, Measurements, Modeling and predic- any kind of networking protocols, including wireless appli-
tion; I.6.6 [Computing Methodologies]: Simulation Out- cations. But, for the simulations to be helpful, it is neces-
put Analysis sary that the simulated behaviors match as closely as pos-
sible the reality. This latter requirement implies to address
several issues. Firstly, the application is likely to rely on ex-
General Terms isting components, such as collision detection module, radio
Measurement, Performance propagation or MAC protocols. The correct modelisation
of these components in the simulator is crucial. Each algo-
Keywords rithm that is being evaluated is modeled in detail, but the
interaction with the other layers is often not taken into ac-
Mobile Ad-hoc networks, MANET, flooding, simulations,
count. Secondly, the simulation parameters and its environ-
simulators, accuracy, OPNET, NS-2, GloMoSim
ment (mobility schemes, power ranges, connectivity) must
be realistic. Incorrect initial conditions, for example may
lead to unexpected results not exploitable in a real network.
∗
The work presented in this paper was supported by the Na- This paper presents a set of measures collected during the
tional Competence Center in Research on Mobile Informa- simulation of the flooding algorithm on different simulators
tion and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS), a center (OPNET, NS-2, GloMoSim). This very simple broadcast
supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under
grant 5005-67322. algorithm (which simply consists in forwarding to the neigh-
boring nodes every message received for the first time) is a
basic building block for several wireless network protocols
(such as routing or groups membership protocols, for exam-
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for ple). We have carefully implemented it in each simulator
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are paying special attention in setting the same parameters and
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies considering the same scenarios. But, surprisingly, we have
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to collected very different results, barely comparable.
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next
permission and/or a fee.
POMC’02, October 30-31, 2002, Toulouse, France. Section presents the flooding algorithm and the simulated
Copyright 2002 ACM 1-58113-511-4/02/0010 ...$5.00. application. Section 4 discusses briefly the architecture and
the deployment procedure of each simulators. Then Section m
m
5 describes in detail the different scenarios and presents the m m m C m m m C
m
results. Section 6 concludes this paper. A B A B
m
D D
2. RELATED WORK (a) E
(b) E
Introduction Parameters
Table 1 summarizes all the common constant parameters of
Several scenarios have been implemented on each simula-
the simulations. In addition to these static parameters, the
tor (OPNET, GloMoSim and NS-2). For the simulations
we considered a wireless ad-hoc network of 50 mobile nodes,
Parameters Value
uniformly placed on a terrain of 1 km x 1 km. All nodes runs
the IEEE 802.11 [4] MAC protocol in the ad-hoc mode (or Terrain size 1km x 1km
peer-to-peer). In opposition to the infrastructure mode, the Number of nodes 50
ad-hoc mode does not require any central base station (or ac- Node placement uniform
cess point). The network is completely peer-to-peer. More- Nb. of broadcasting nodes 10
over, since we are in a broadcast communication scheme, Nb. of broadcasts per node 100
the MAC protocol runs without request-to-send (RTS) and MAC protocol 802.11 without RTS/CTS
clear-to-send (CTS) 1 . This technique solves the well known Bit rate 2 Mbps
hidden terminal problem, but does only apply to point-to- Wireless propagation model FreeSpace
point communications and has no sense for a broadcast en- Antenna Type Omnidirectional
vironment. The physical layer has a data rate of 2 Mbps. Mobility model Random Waypoint
Each simulation run lasts 300 seconds during which 10 nodes Minimum node speed 0 m/s
initiate 100 broadcasts that will be flooded throughout the
whole network. Table 1: Static parameters
Overhead [packets]
influences the success rate in MANET : the effective trans-
mission range. We notice important differences between the 1500
100 0 5 10 15 20
Max speed [meters/second]
90
4
success rate. The most important is the maximal success
rate that can be achieved by NS-2 for our scenarios. It is 3
1
Power range = 200 m, Pause time = 100 s,
Broadcast rate = 4 pk/s 0
0 5 10 15 20
100
Max speed [meters/second]
60