Creating an object-oriented wireless network simulator

Abstract

Wireless routing protocols are currently among the most actively researched areas in computer science. There are hundreds of such protocols already established and even more under development. Wireless network simulators however have not received as much attention. Currently, there are only a handful of these simulators which are powerful tools for analyzing routing protocols. But, altering their code can be tremendously cumbersome due to the great level of detail they were developed. Some of these systems were designed using the object-oriented programming languages but failed to take into account the various strengths of using such languages, such as inheritance and polymorphism furthermore making them less extensible. As we have researched wireless routing at Drake University, we have found the need to develop our own wireless simulator as a test environment for our protocols. The goal of this simulator was to improve the ability to add new and sometimes very different wireless protocols to the system and remove the overhead and complexity in the layers of wireless communication. We felt to develop such protocols and test features of interest to us we should not be required to have an in-depth knowledge of the networking layers.