ANEJOS: a Java based simulator for ad hoc networks

doi:10.1016/S0167-739X(00)00040-6

Future Generation Computer Systems

Volume 17, Issue 5, March 2001, Pages 573-583

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-739X(00)00040-6 Get rights and content

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are multi-hop wireless networks where mobile devices communicate using a shared, low power, low bandwidth channel without any wired infrastructure: each node acts also as a router of its neighbors. Ad hoc networks protocol design is still a new and growing research area; there currently is an IETF Working Group working on the definition of a standard for such networks. Various proposals are being evaluated and the need for a common comparison framework arises. This paper presents a simulator called ANEJOS (ad hoc networks Java simulator). The simulator is written in Java and is based on the SimJava tool and allows to be adapted to various routing protocols. It also allows considering other relevant aspects to ad hoc networks, like mobility patterns and traffic generation patterns. ANEJOS shared our models with other researchers through the internet, we can use Java applets inside HTML pages containing the whole simulator.

Introduction

An ad hoc network is a multi-hop wireless network where mobile devices communicate using a shared, low power, low bandwidth channel. These mobile devices can establish and maintain network connections while moving inside the covered area. The network topology may vary rapidly, typically due to node migration and to signal interference and power outages. No wired backbone or any sort of centralized network management system is present. Control is distributed and every node is required to cooperate to support messages routing. Due to either the high rate of changes in the network topology and the characteristics of the communication channel, it is not possible to employ the same routing algorithms used in static networks.

Various dedicated algorithms have been proposed to solve routing issues for this environment (see [1], [2]). In [3] we presented a dedicated routing protocol designed to provide communication support to a collection of mobile robots. Our project consisted in arranging the mobile robots over a lake to monitor water conditions. Each robot, powered by a solar panel, is provided with a micro-controller to execute all the processing. Inside the robot there are a few sensors for temperature, pH level, and oxygen concentration and an air-pumping device. Data transmission is carried out by a wireless modem operating at a common carrier frequency of 433 MHz and with a short reaching range (a few hundreds of meters due to their low power, only 1 mW). The task of the robots was to pump air into the water to rise the oxygen levels in required areas. Robots could change their position due to the water drift, the wind or human intervention. We wanted the system to be able to react autonomously to the possible changes in the topology.

Ad hoc networks protocol design is still a new and growing research area; there currently is an IETF Working Group working on the definition of a standard for such networks. As said before, various proposals are issued and the need for a common comparison framework arises. With this in mind we designed a simulator called ANEJOS (ad hoc networks Java simulator). The simulator is written in Java and is structured to be extensible and adaptable to cope with the various routing protocols. As Section 3 illustrates, ANEJOS is based on a few basic classes which models the communication medium, the mobile devices and the interchanged messages. These classes can be implemented and extended depending on the characteristics of the protocol to be analyzed. Other classes, namely the mobility class and the traffic generation class, provide complementary extensibility aspects to the simulator. The mobility class allows experimenting with the behavior of the routing protocol with different mobility patterns; in this work we propose the details of three mobility patterns. The traffic generation class allows simulating the behavior of the routing protocols with different data generation patterns or even with transport or application layer protocols, providing extensive features to the simulator.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 shortly presents the WARP as an example of a routing protocol for an ad hoc network. Section 3 presents the simulator structure. Section 4 illustrates the details of the used mobility models. In Section 5, we demonstrate how the simulator can be extended to analyze other routing protocols, traffic generation patterns or data-link layer protocols. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper resuming the results obtained and the on-going work.

Section snippets

The routing protocol WARP

We designed an ad hoc networks routing protocol called WARP (wireless “Albufera” routing protocol). WARP is a lightweight protocol based on the activity of a dedicated node called the coordinator. The coordinator is a fixed node that sends all the control information required from the mobile devices to operate and that receives all the information collected by the robots. The protocol constituted of two parts: the forward routing protocol and the backward routing protocol. The forward routing

The simulator structure

The starting point on building the simulator in Java was the idea shown by the SimJava package authors [4]: $“You can build a simulator that lets other people view your results on their own workstation”.$ SimJava is a process based discrete event simulation package for Java, similar to Jade’s Sim++, with animation facilities that allow the user to see the progress of the simulation [5]. This possibility proves to be very helpful when defining the details of a new piece of software like, in our case, a routing

Mobility models

Testing protocol behavior in different scenarios of mobility is what led us to include various mobility patterns in our model. In fact, we think that the most important aspect to perform a comparative evaluation of several protocols is to test them in similar mobility scenarios. Anyway, the lack of such kind of models also led us to design some of them, trying to model real world moving patterns associated to some common task performed either by humans or by robots. The idea was to put a

Simulator extensions

The current model is only dealing with a certain routing algorithm and let us choose the mobility pattern you want. The current structure allows users to implement their own algorithms to measure their behavior. However, several improvements are possible in order to study other phenomena, like:

•
Media access issues. In the current version, the simulator does not take into account what is the real media access protocol. This means that we are not covering the possible interactions between the

Conclusions and future work

Ad hoc networks protocol design is still a new and growing research area; there currently is an IETF Working Group working on the definition of a standard for such networks. Various proposals are issued and the need for a common comparison framework arises. This paper presented a simulator called ANEJOS (ad hoc networks Java simulator). The simulator is written in Java and is structured to be extensible and adaptable to cope with the various routing protocols. Some researchers of ad hoc

Miguel Sánchez obtained his B.S. in Computer Science in 1988 and his M.S. in Computer Science in 1992, both from the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, where he is now an Assistant Professor at the CS department. His current research is in routing and media access control in ad hoc networks on which he is pursuing his Ph.D.

References (5)

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Pietro Manzoni received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the “Universitá degli Studi”, Milan, Italy, in 1989, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the “Politecnico di Milano”, Milan, Italy, in 1995. Since 1995, he is an Assistant Professor of Computer Networks at the “Universidad Politecnica de Valencia”, Valencia, Spain. His research interests are in the theory, design and implementation of communication protocols.

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