ShoX: An Easy to Use Simulation Platform for Wireless Networks

For the evaluation of wireless network protocols, simulation has established itself as a good compromise between cost and complexity, on the one hand, and accuracy of results, on the other hand. Most established network simulators, however, were originally developed for wired networks and only later extended to the wireless domain. Some simulators like Opnet are not even restricted to communication networks at all, but can be used to simulate all kinds of networked systems. In this paper, we present ShoX, a network simulator explicitly designed for the simulation of wireless networks. Together with its strong GUI support, this allows a very efficient development and evaluation of network protocols without any considerable learning curve. All relevant concepts known from the domain of wireless networks like nodes, links, OSI layers, packets, mobility, signal propagation and traffic models are directly available. Defining new layers, packets or models is as easy as subclassing the existing abstract classes which ensures at compile time that all required methods are provided by the user. ShoX is completely based on Java and XML, thus superseding to learn unfamiliar languages like Tcl or NED. It features an integrated GUI for configuration, visualization and statistics.