Exploiting Link Diversity for Performance-Aware and Repeatable Simulation in Low-Power Wireless Networks

Network simulation is a fundamental service for performance testing and protocol design in wireless networks. Due to the wireless dynamics, it is highly challenging to provide repeatable and reliable simulation results that are comparable to the empirical experimental results. To achieve repeatability for simulation, the existing works focus on reproducing the behaviors on individual links. However, as observed in recent works, individual link behaviors alone are far from enough to characterize the protocol-level performance. As a result, even if the link behaviors can be simulated very closely, these works often fail to simulate the protocol performance with high reliability. In this article, we propose a novel performance-aware simulation approach which can preserve not only the link-level behaviors but also the performance-level behaviors. We first combine the spatial-temporal link diversity to devise an accurate performance model. Based on the model, we then propose a Performance Aware Hidden Markov Model (PA-HMM), where the protocol performance is directly fed into the Markov state transitions. Compared to the existing works, PA-HMM is able to simulate both link-level behaviors and high-level protocol performance. We conduct extensive testbed and simulation experiments with broadcast and anycast protocols. The results show that 1) the proposed model is able to accurately characterize communication performance for both broadcast and anycast and 2) the protocol performance is closely simulated as compared to the empirical results and the PA-HMM based simulation is more repeatable compared to the existing works.