Simulating capture behaviour in 802.11 radio modems

Simulation plays an important role in the performance evaluation of MAC protocols. Building simulation models which are able to accurately model physical behaviour is fundamental to the outcome of such techniques. Through both qualitative and quantitative comparison of experimental trace data against simulation results obtained using delay, power, and hybrid capture models, this paper investigates the performance of various packet capture models in the simulation analysis of the 802.11 PHY and MAC layer protocols. We illustrate these models are unable to accurately describe the fairness properties of the experimental data. A new model is proposed, Message Retraining, to describe the operation of an 802.11 receiver. We illustrate that the Message Retraining reception model is able to model the fairness characteristics obtained with an IEEE 802.11 radio modem more accurately than the previous capture models.