Masood Khosroshahy - IEEE 802.11 and Propagation Modeling: A Survey and a Practical Design Approach

Due to known difficulties of researchers in the networking domain regarding experimentation of their ideas in actual networks, network simulators have become indispensable tools for investigating and validating various ideas in all layers of the network. In this survey, we inspect the implementations of IEEE 802.11 PHY-MAC and propagation models of some of the well-known, open-source network simulators. The chosen simulators are: NS-2, OMNeT++, GloMoSim, J-Sim and JiST/SWANS. The study concentrates on the availability and implementation flexibility of MAC modes, physical layer features and propagation models. This survey could help the research community in determining the state-of-the-art of IEEE 802.11 implementations and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first such study published in the open literature. To facilitate the ongoing and future network simulator developments, we also present our design and implementation approaches in successfully developing a prototype of a detailed IEEE 802.11a PHY layer along with the propagation models.