The Effect of the Radio Wave Propagation Model in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The simulation of wireless networks has been an important tool for researchers and the industry in the last years. Especially in the field of Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, most current results have been achieved using simulators. The need for reproducible results and easy to observe environments limits the use of real world measurements for those kind of networks. It is stated here that the radio wave propagation model has a strong impact on the results of the simulation run. This work shows the limitations of current simulation environments and describes a high accuracy propagation model based on the use of a ray-tracer. By using a parallelized preprocessing step we made this propagation model feasible for usage in network simulators. Based on two examples, the effects on characteristic performance properties in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are shown. We found that the physical layer simulation has a great impact on routing protocol efficiency.