Performance evaluation and simulation verification for wireless ad-hoc networks

A wireless Ad-hoc network is a collection of wireless nodes that are capable of communicating with each other without the need for any central management infrastructure. In this paper, we report the experimental results obtained from physically establishing a small ad-hoc network. These results include the measurement of network throughput for both TCP and UDP packets, as well as the delay in transmission of TCP packets. These results are then analyzed and compared with those obtained from simulations that are carried out using OPNET simulator. Correlation between the two sets of results is found to be satisfactory enough to validate the simulation technique and process. Given this validation, based on similar simulation techniques, the investigation of a larger scale Ad-hoc network is then carried out. The simulation results of the larger scale network confirm our previously obtained results. The effect of signal strength on the routing and throughput values is among several other issues investigated through simulation studies. The simulation results also show that the nature of the drop in throughput, with respect to the number of nodes trying to communicate simultaneously with a single node, is linear in nature.