SCSC2003 Abstract S9489
Integrating Distributed Wireless Simulation Into Genesis Framework
Integrating Distributed Wireless Simulation Into Genesis Framework
Submitting Author: Dr. Boleslaw Szymanski
Abstract:
The rapid advancement in portable computing platforms and wireless communication technology has resulted in increased interest in the design and development of instantly deployable wireless networks, often referred to as ``ad-hoc networks''. They are indispensable in environments in which a fixed communication infrastructure, wired or wireless, either never existed or has been destroyed. The applications of such networks extend to several different application areas. In the civilian applications, they can be used to interconnect users moving in a urban or rural area or a campus and engaging in collaborative activity such as distributed scientific experiments, emergency actions or search and rescue operations. In the law enforcement sector, applications such as crowd control and border patrols are the obvious targets. In the military environment, the modern communications in a battlefield theater require a very sophisticated instant infrastructure with far more complex requir
ements and constraints than deliverable through wired networks, especially in view of the unpredictability of engagement areas.
The design and evaluation of these ad-hoc networks introduces several unique challenges. Some of the most significant among them include the shared broadcast medium between thousands of nodes, the mobility of the nodes and the unpredictable nature of the wireless channels with problems such as fading, obstacles and interference. That makes the simulation a valuable tool to design and optimize the distributed wireless networks and their interoperability with wired networks.
To reap the full potential of the simulation in wireless network optimization, simulation must achieve real-time or near real-time performance. This is challenging because simulating large networks at the packet level requires large computational power to execute all events that packets undergo in the network. Packets crossing the boundaries of parallel partitions impose tight synchronization between parallel processors, thereby lowering parallel efficiency of the execution. In addition, in the case of ad-hoc networks, we also have nodes crossing the boundaries of the partitions during the simulation.
To address this challenge we designed the Genesis system and adopted it for simulating ad-hoc networks. This extension is implemented over GloMoSim, a scalable simulation library for wireless network simulation developed at UCLA. In the paper we describe this extension, its performance and interoperability with wired network simulators.
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