WiFi Simulations

Our IEEE 802.11a/g/p transceiver comes with a complete simulation tool chain and two example simulation studies; one to study the performance of the encoding schemes over an AWGN channel, and one to study the sensitivity of the frame detection algorithm. You can find the relevant files in the simulations folder.

The whole process is orchestrated by a Makefile, which has several advantages:

• Simulations can be run in parallel
• Canceled or failed runs are repeated automatically
• No need for manual dependency tracking

The work flow is straightforward and comprises:

1. Create a non-GUI flow graph that can be configured through command line arguments (cf. Parameter block). The flow graph logs its output to a normal file or a PCAP frame dump, dependent on what aspect of the system is studied. To ease evaluation of the results, the parameters are part of the output file name.
2. We configure the parameters and repetitions in the Makefile, which runs the flow graph with all parameter combinations.
3. Once all simulations runs are completed, a parse script will iterate through all output files to extract relevant information (like the number of received frames). The results are stored in a CSV file.
4. The resulting CSV file is processed with a Python script that visualizes the results in a graph.

Once everything is setup, the whole process can be started with make -j 5, where the -j option defines the number of parallel simulation runs.

Starting the Makefiles of the example simulations included with the module will produce the following graphs.