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Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation

John Heidemann, Nirupama Bulusu, Jeremy Elson, Chalermek Intanagonwiwat, Kun-chan Lan, Ya Xu, Wei Ye, Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, and John Heidemann
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 associated with adding detail to simulation models. We evaluate the effects of detail in five 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, gzip'ed postscript, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Heidemann00d: John Heidemann, Nirupama Bulusu, Jeremy Elson, Chalermek Intanagonwiwat, Kun-chan Lan, Ya Xu, Wei Ye, Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, and John Heidemann. Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation. submitted to SCS Communication Networks and Distributed Systems Modeling and Simulation Conference. September, 2000. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00d.html>.

@unpublished{Heidemann00d,
	author = "John Heidemann and Nirupama Bulusu and Jeremy Elson
 and Chalermek Intanagonwiwat and Kun-chan Lan
 and Ya Xu and Wei Ye and Deborah Estrin and
 Ramesh Govindan and John Heidemann",
	title = "Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation",
	note = "submitted to SCS Communication Networks and Distributed Systems Modeling and Simulation Conference",
	year = "2000",
	month = "September",
	keywords = "network simulation",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00d.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00d.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00d.pdf",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

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.

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