A flexible and fast event-driven simulator for wireless MAC protocols

Abstract

Recently, many multiple-access (MAC) protocols have been or are being proposed for wireless networks. As most of these multiple-access protocols are designed for specific applications (such as telephony) and analyzed accordingly, the analysis results can not always be adapted to situations where each user has a different behavior. Wireless MAC protocols for data communication are not straightforward to analyse. To quickly make a reliable judgement of the usability of a MAC protocol for specific situations, we designed a simulator that makes it simple to implement the protocol and test it in different configurations and with differently behaving users. Our simulator generates a large amount of quantitative performance information that can be processed with standard graph drawing tools and an integrated trace analyzer.