The Design And Realization Of Fundamental Simulation Platform For MAC Protocol

The computer simulation technology is more and more common used in industrial production, scientific research and other various walks of life. Simluation not only can be an analysis tool to forecast system changes, but also can be a design tool to study the performance of system under different conditions and environment. In the course of designing and realizing a communication protocol, or to simulate the behavior of protocol or analyze and compare the performance among different protocols, simulation always plays a crucial role. There are many simulation tools, such as MATLAB, NS, OPNET. If we consider from language function needs, ease of use and cost, the tools mentioned above are not able to fit the needs of MAC protocol's simulation requirements. So it is necessary to develop a general simulation platform for MAC protocol.This paper mainly focuses on the design and realization of fundamental simulation platform for MAC protocal and the validations of platform's correctness and effectiveness. First, this paper introduces the main schemes of MAC layer, and proposed the requirements for simulation platform, including the support of different medium access methods, support of different topologies' expression, multi-channel support and ease of use. Then a detailed description of platform's design thinking is given, including discrete event model, flow generator model, topology representation, separation of PHY layer and MAC layer, distributed channel state tag. These thoughts are the guidance of platform's realization. As with the programming techniques, platform's basic elements and PHY layer's fixed events' process, a detailed description about the realization of platform is given. Finally, according to the requirements, this paper design different basic scenarios, analyze the operation procedures of these scenarios to verify that the platform will work correctly. What's more, a simple CSMA access mechanism is designed to study the effect of different nodes' number to the throughput, the throughput is weighted by the successfully sended packets' number. It is showed that the throughput is decreasing as the nodes increasing, but this can be improved by enlarging the backoff time's choice range. By this way, the platform's overall effectiveness is verified.