[Battlemesh] ns-3 - Network Simulator

[Henning Rogge]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 3:54 PM, fboehm <fboehm at aon.at> wrote:
> I think this is the basic difference between a network emulator and a
> network simulator, right?
>
> The emulator runs real code in a virtual environment. The simulator runs
> code that simulates the behavior of the real code in relation to it's
> environment.
>
> What I like about the simulation is that it technically can also simulate
> mutual interference in mesh networks. Not sure if and how this could be done
> with emulators. They might only have more like static settings for latency,
> jitter, packet loss with a predefined variance.

As far as I would say the difference is about "realtime"...

emulation runs in real time, so it is limited by the CPU of your computer.

simulation is normally "event driven", which allows you to take some
time for complex computation but makes it difficult to use unmodified
software.

And running a special implementation of "protocol X" in a simulator
might give you unexpected results that you cannot verify with the real
software.

Henning