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Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation

Nirupama Bulusu, Jeremy Elson, Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, John Heidemann, Chalermek Intanagonwiwat, Nader Salehi, Kun-chan Lan, Ya Xu, and Wei Ye
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Experience with wired networks has provides guidance about what level of detail is appropriate for simulation-based protocol studies. Wireless simulations raise many new questions about approriate levels of detail in simulation models for radio propagation and energy consumption. This paper describes the trade-offs in more detailed or abstract simulation models. We evaluate the effects of detail in four case studies of wireless simulations for protocol design. Ultimately the researcher must judge what level of detail is required for a given question, but we suggest two approaches to cope with varying levels of detail. When error is not correlated, networking algorithms that are robust to a range of errors are often stressed in similar ways by random error as by detailed models. We also suggest visualization techniques that can help pinpoint incorrect details and manage detail overload.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Bulusu00b: Nirupama Bulusu, Jeremy Elson, Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, John Heidemann, Chalermek Intanagonwiwat, Nader Salehi, Kun-chan Lan, Ya Xu, and Wei Ye. Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation. Technical Report ISI-TR-2000-523, USC/Information Sciences Institute, June, 2000. An updated version of this paper appears as \urlhttp://www.isi.edu/ johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann01a.html. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Bulusu00b.html>.

@techreport{Bulusu00b,
	author = "Nirupama Bulusu and Jeremy Elson and Deborah Estrin and Ramesh Govindan and John Heidemann and Chalermek Intanagonwiwat and Nader Salehi and Kun-chan Lan and Ya Xu and Wei Ye",
	title = "Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation",
	institution = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	year = "2000",
	number = "ISI-TR-2000-523",
	note = "An updated version of this paper appears as \url{http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann01a.html}",
	month = "June",
	keywords = "wireless network simulatin, detail",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Bulusu00b.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Bulusu00b.pdf",
	copyrightholder = "author",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2000 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.