RTS/CTS Data Link Abstractions for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The running time for high fidelity simulation of large-scale mobile ad hoc networks can be prohibitively high. The execution time of physical effects calculations for a single transmission alone can grow unmanageable to account for all potential receivers. Discrete event simulators can also suffer from excessive generation and processing of events, both due to network size and model complexity. In this paper, we present three levels of abstracting the IEEE 802.11 RTS/CTS channel access mechanism. In the process of assessing their ability to mitigate runtime-cost while retaining comparable results to that of a commercially available simulator, OPNET, we found that the abstractions were better suited to collecting one metric over another