A packet level simulation study of adhoc network with network simulator-2 (NS-2)

Researchers in the field of computer networking often relies on appropriate simulators to diagnose network and to analyze the impact of various parameters on the network performance. There now exists several simulators (in the areas of wireless ad-hoc network) that offer various features to measure network performance. One such simulator that recently gained high popularity among researchers in the area of networking is Network Simulator 2 (NS-2). In this paper, we present a short survey on NS-2 for packet level simulation. The paper demonstrates how packet level simulation is conducted using NS-2. The paper furthermore explores the advantages and the drawbacks of NS-2 in the light of packet loss, interval period, traffic type and pattern. The techniques used in this work to measure network performance can be replicated in other related work. Simulated results with the NS-2 simulator show remarkable correlation with that of the theoretical estimation. The most remarkable contribution of this paper is this paper shows simulation for packet level analysis with NS-2 with details parameter setting, network scenarios and other necessary configurations which will lead the researchers to investigate network efficiency and performance measurements.