[Battlemesh] Battlemesh Digest, Vol 68, Issue 16

[Tom Henderson]

 > On 17.11.15 20:12, fboehm wrote:
 > > The simulation would also need to include different antenna types
 > > that are used at each node (omni, sector, directional). Without
 > > having ever simulated a wireless network it sounds like a complex
 > > setup to me. The results could be simply bogus because the simulation
 > > model isn't comprehensive.
 >
 > IIRC, ns-3 supports directional antenna models:
 > Input is node positions, antenna orientations and gain characteristics.
 > Output is additional loss/gain factors which are added to the pairwise
 > path losses.

Yes, ns-3 does support directional antennas [1], but they require the
use of a spectrum channel type that is not presently supported for
Wi-Fi (although support is planned for this channel type by our next
release).

 >
 > You don't seem to need a frequency selective model setup.
 >
 > So, the "only" thing you have to take care of is to check if the
 > receiver (and thus interference) model and the overall path loss model
 > fit to your scenario well enough. Our measurements indicate that the
 > ns-3 interference model seems to be good enough for most needs (at least
 > when we are talking about AWGN and Atheros chipsets). Which leaves an
 > unmatched path loss model to be the main source of prediction error.
 >
 > > Maybe an acceptable alternative approach is to statically calculate
 > > a table that stores the level and variance of interference each node
 > > generates to every other node. The data in this table would be the
 > > input to a network emulator that emulates throughput, latency,
 > > jitter, loss.
 >
 > Calculation of these numbers needs again a well matched path loss model.
 > But if you can *measure* pairwise path attenuations in your mesh that
 > could be then turned into a static path loss matrix that can be plugged
 > into ns-3 as is.
 >

Yes, this is our MatrixPropagationLossModel [2].

- Tom

[1] https://www.nsnam.org/docs/release/3.24/models/html/antenna.html

[2] 
https://www.nsnam.org/docs/release/3.24/models/html/propagation.html#matrixpropagationlossmodel