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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, and Ramesh Govindan
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 appropriate 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

Heidemann01a: John Heidemann, Nirupama Bulusu, Jeremy Elson, Chalermek Intanagonwiwat, Kun-chan Lan, Ya Xu, Wei Ye, Deborah Estrin, and Ramesh Govindan. Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation. In Proceedings of the SCS Multiconference on Distributed Simulation, pp. 3-11. Phoenix, Arizona, USA, USC/Information Sciences Institute, Society for Computer Simulation. January, 2001. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann01a.html>.

@inproceedings{Heidemann01a,
	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",
	title = "Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the  {SCS} Multiconference on Distributed Simulation",
	year = "2001",
	publisher = "Society for Computer Simulation",
	address = "Phoenix, Arizona, USA",
	month = "January",
	pages = "3--11",
	keywords = "network simulation, wireless network simulation;
		simulation validation, detail, accuracy;
		energy-aware ad hoc routing; data diffusion; localization;
		robotics; network protocol visualization",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann01a.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann01a.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann01a.pdf",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2001 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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