TimSim: A Timestep-Based Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Simulator

Abstract

Wireless hosts can communicate with each other without a fixed infrastructure in wireless ad-hoc networks. Deploying and monitoring a large number of hosts in such networks involves high cost and intensive labor. As a result, most experiments are achievable through simulation. However, most simulators currently used are intended to evaluate individual routing protocols or algorithms. Direct simulation of an application's source code is not supported. To simulate an application, we have to extract the protocols or algorithms from the source code and rewrite them in accordance with the simulator's requirements. In this paper, we introduce a new wireless ad-hoc network simulator called TimSim. TimSim focuses on simulating the source code of wireless ad-hoc network application directly. As a unique feature, TimSim provides some similar APIs with real device driver so that users can simulate their source code on TimSim with only a few modifications. Driven by a timestep-based simulation engine, TimSim can simulate the data transmitted over wireless ad-hoc networks in bit-level. Additionally, we import database to store the simulation data that TimSim generates. Performance evaluation by means of a series of benchmark experiments demonstrates the efficiency of TimSim. Also a case study is presented to illustrate the practicability of TimSim.