Techniques for simulation of realistic infrastructure wireless network traffic

In the design of wireless networking protocols and systems, simulation has become the primary form of initial validation and performance evaluation. Hence, ensuring the realism of simulators and simulation methods is fundamental for simulated results to be interpretable. In this paper, we provide a simulation framework for infrastructure wireless network traffic that allows researchers to use publicly available captured traces as a primary or background traffic source. We investigate the question of trace classification as a necessary task for these traces to be useful and apply our framework to a well-known power-saving application, showing that the use of real traffic provides substantially different results as compared to traffic generated from an application-specific fitted model or contrived source. Additionally, we show how trace classification provides unique insights into application behavior in both typical and extreme scenarios.