Mans : mobile ad hoc network simulator

Abstract EN

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any centralized administration or standard support services.

The deployment and the debugging of wireless applications on a real network can be rather tiresome if large networks are considered (typically hundreds of nodes).

This is why simulation is an important tool in the sense that it can often help to improve or validate protocols.

Existing simulators provide a wide variety of environments for the testing and debugging of such systems but with a divergence between their performances.

It was proposed that instead of simulations, it is probably more realistic to consider a hybrid approach in which only the lowest layers (MAC and physical) and the mobility model are simulated and all the upper layers (from transport to application) are executed on a dedicated hosts.

In this paper we introduce a visual Mobile Ad hoc Network Simulator (MANS) that provides various functionalities and a user friendly GUI that enable the user to configure the simulation environment to check its behavior.

This simulator implements the lowest layers (Network, MAC and Physical) and provides a traffic source generator.

It also enables the user to implement his own protocols to be integrated with the already built in simulation environment.