Simulation Vs. Emulation: Evaluating Mobile Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols

Overview

In order for simulation studies to be useful, it is very important that the simulation results match as closely as possible with the testbed results. This paper compares emulated testbed results with simulation results from NS2 and GloMoSim. OLSR was used as a routing protocol and NRL Mobile Network Emulator (MNE) for dynamic topology control and manipulation. Five Linux based laptops, equipped with IEEE 802.11b wireless network cards were used for testbed implementation. At low traffic rates, testbed results matched closely with the simulation results, at higher traffic rates, testbed results not only differed from the simulation results both qualitatively and quantitatively but the simulation results from both the simulators were barely comparable in some scenarios.