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Simulation of 802.11 Networks using NS-2
Raviteja Gadde (raviteja969@ufl.edu)
Abstract—802.11 networks are a set of evolving
standards for wireless local area networks developed
by IEEE. These networks have become extremely
popular and are found almost everywhere. These
networks overcame many problems associated with
extreme noise present in air interface and also
security issues. In this paper, we will discuss the
fundamental properties of these networks. Then we
will study these networks using NS-2, a network
simulator.
Index Terms— IEEE 802.11, Network Simulator-2,
CSMA/CA, Contention Window.
I. INTRODUCTION
Communication is an important part of livelihood on
this planet. From the evolution of language,
communicating has played a key role in human lives. In
recent years, there has been an explosion in
communication systems. From analog systems to high-
speed digital systems these networks are pervasive.
Initially these were wired and fixed at a particular place.
Mobility has become key in present era ability to access
information the go provides an advantage to businesses.
802 standards were first developed for wired LANs
and then extended to wireless in terms of 802.11. 802.11
are basically a MAC layer specification as were previous
specification since 802.3. These standards started with
speeds of 2Mbps and now reached theoretical speeds of
500Mbps (802.11n). WiFi devices, which use these
standards for wireless LANs, have made this standard
greatly reachable and popular. Now, we can find 802.11
compatible devices in almost all portable computers,
smart phones and gaming consoles.
The standard uses features form Ethernet along with
CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with
Collision Avoidance). This is basically CSMA version
from Ethernet adapted to wireless LANs. In this paper
we study these components of 802.11. We use NS-2 to
study these networks. NS-2 is basically present
generation network simulator developed using C++ and
OTCL. We use this to conduct some simulations of
1
802.11 and draw inferences regarding the inner
workings of these networks.
The paper follows the following order. Sections 2 and
3 look in to details of 802.11. Followed by section 4
explaining NS-2 in details. Then we look in to
simulations done using NS-2 in sections 5 and 6.
II.802.11
The idea of wireless networks is quite compelling. But
it has some fundamental challenges. Radio transmission
is highly susceptible to noise and also signal strength
plays an important role in these systems. Having
concrete walls can seriously degrade the quality of signal
making the system inaccessible with short distances. The
medium of communication here is air and it’s
everywhere. This makes it both strongest and weakest
point of 802.11. This quality gives us the advantages of
mobility and at the same time making it insecure. There
is no way we can secure air from eavesdropping. Finally
radio communications use spectrum, which is scarce and
regulated. Spectrum issue was addressed by using
unlicensed bands of 2.5Ghz and 5Ghz. The protocol was
developed to incorporate strong error control and
security measures to overcome these problems.
Wireless LANs can be divided in to two types: Ad-
Hoc and infrastructure LANs. Ad-Hoc networks are
temporary in nature. It usually has a group of stations
communicating with each other and can be formed
spontaneously.
To understand Infrastructure networks we need to look
in to concept of Basic Service Set (BSS). BSS is a set of
stations coordinating access over a medium.
Infrastructure networks combine BSSs with a Access
Point and a distribution system combining with a Portal
to internet. These also have options of authenticating
stations and privacy options. When Multiple BSSs are
interconnected it’s called an Extended Service Set.
To provide compatibility with 802 LANs all MAC
layers should present same format to LLC so MAC layer
handle the mobility of the stations.
The 802.11 MAC layer uses coordination functions to
determine when stations are allowed to transmit. 802.11
mainly use Distributed Coordination Function (DCF)
under which all stations are in contention for channel.
Another Coordination function, Point Coordination
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Function (PCF), is optionally included in the
specification. In this the access point can describe
contention and contention free periods. Contention free
period gives AP the control on who gets the channel
eliminating any contention.
A. Distributed Coordination Function:
DCF supports asynchronous data transmission on best
effort basis. Ad-Hoc networks use only DCF while
infrastructure networks can use both DCF and PCF. This
function sits over physical layer. DCF is mainly based
on CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision
Avoidance) protocol.
CSMA was first used in 802.3 LANs where it used
collision detection. In CSMA, nodes check if channel is
idle to start a transmission. In 802.3 LANs when a
channel detects collision it backs off for a certain slot
time and wais for channel to get idle. This method works
fine in a wired medium where it is possible to detect
collision using electrical energy of signal. But in
wireless medium detecting collision is nearly
impossible. There are many interfaces in the medium,
which can’t be controlled, and also the factor of mobility
of stations makes detection not feasible on a noisy
channel.
To overcome this problem the protocol with Collision
Avoidance was developed. Since collisions can’t be
detected we avoid them. Here each station tries to obtain
the channel at times generated randomly. CSMA/CA
works by making the channel idle for certain period after
a transmission. This time is called inter-frame Space
(IFS).
The IFS depends on priority of frames. If it’s a high
priority frame like a ACK frame waits smaller time
called SIFS (short IFS). Then there is normal waiting
time called DIFS (DCF IFS), which applies to normal
data. There is an intermediate IFS called PIFS used by
PCF when contention free period is set.
Every station has to wait for a random Back-Off time
when it fails to obtain the channel. This random number
is chose using Contention Window. A value CWmin is
set and each channel chooses a random number between
[0,CWmin] which specifies the Back-Off slots. Time of
each Back-Off slot is determined by PHY layer
parameter slot time. This time differs for standards like
802.11b uses 20 microseconds while 802.11g- only uses
9 microseconds. One thing to remember here is that to
provide backward compatibility 802.11g+802.11b can
use 20 microseconds if any legacy devices are also
present in network.
So when a station transmits a frame and on successful
receipt of ACK frame, it waits for specifies DIFS and
random contention slot it selected to transmit the next
2
frame. If another station obtains this channel before
back-off slot expires then the timer restarts again when
the contention period starts. This means that stations
waiting for longer time can obtain the channel earlier
than newer stations waiting. This introduces some
amount of fairness in sharing of the wireless channel.
When a station fails on transmission, didn’t receive
ACK frame with in time out, then for re-transmission the
back-off slot number is not selected from [0,CWmin] but
is doubled until CWmax is reached. If the number of re-
transmissions exceeds a certain value the frame is
dropped and CW value is reset to its minimum. This
time frame is vendor dependant.
One thing we can understand from this is that if
CWmin value is high station may needed to wait longer
than necessary to transmit reducing throughput. In
802.11 standard CW value is defaulted to 31. When
stations in the system are low, smaller CW sizes can
provide better throughput. In following sections we will
explore this using simulations of a five-node network.
802.11 networks suffer from a problem called hidden
node problem. For example take 3 nodes A, B, C where
B can see A and C while A and C are unaware of each
other existence. So A can think that B is idle and start
transmission but in reality C is already transmitting to B.
To avoid collisions a mechanism called RTS/CTS is
employed. For example if A wants to transmit to B, it
sends a RTS packet B and if B is idle it sends a CTS
packet to all the stations in its range. So C knows that Bb
is already in transmission and wait till that transmission
ends.
This method is disabled by default in 802.11
networks. This is because usually WLANs are simple
enough and don’t require this and also using RTS/CTS
can degrade the throughput of the system.
Since we are going to deal with Ad-Hoc networks ony
in this paper, we aren’t discussing PCF which is not
possible in Ad-Hoc Networks.
Along with deciding channel access to stations, 802.11
MAC layer has to take care of protocol data unit
addressing, frame formatting, error checking,
fragmentation and reassembly. It also manages the
security and power management of the stations.
III. NETWORK SIMULATOR-2
Network Simulator is a discrete event simulator
developed at UC Berkley in C++ and OTcl. It schedules
events like packet transmission and timer expiration.
Since it is a discrete event scheduler it can’t simulate
events in parallel but that’s not a problem for most
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simulations. The simulator includes protocol sink. It is a simple and best way to analyze the system
implementations for most network components. It can involving multiple connections. We will use these tools
simulate UDP, TCP agents, it can generate application to analyze the network and deduce our observations.
traffic like FTP, CBR (Constant Bit Rate), VBR To create a wireless network we need to specify
(Variable Bit Rate). It also simulates various queuing various properties like method of prorogation, Antenna
systems like DropTail. The wireless extensions were type, Interface queue length and routing type. Figure2
derived from CMU Monarch Project.
NS-2 has two components C++ implementations of
various network components and Tcl scripts to access
those classes. NS is a OTcl interpreter with network
simulation object libraries. OTcl scripts uses objects
from these libraries to create overlay of a network.
Nodes, TCP and UDP agents, scheduling these agents,
bandwidth of links, RTS thresholds, etc all can be
changed using simple objects. We can also access the
C++ libraries in order make any custom objects are
changes.
Ns-2 produces a trace file after completion of Figure2 Properties of Wireless Channel in NS-2 Code
simulation. Studying this trace file gives us the
information we need to understand the workings of the shows a snippet from the code written for simulations
simulation. Each line in trace file starts with an
corresponding to wireless properties.
abbreviation for a event like receive, send, drop, enqueue
and dequeue. Followed by information about nodes that
We create a grid where we place the nodes at specific
it originated or reached, Network Trace level destination
and source address. Parsing these files we obtain packets positions and we can also specify their movement speed
received and dropped and calculate throughput, delay with respect to each other. One thing to remember in
and other parameters of the system. practical implementation RTS/CTS is off by default, but
NAM is another tool with ns-2. It gives us a graphical in NS-2 it’s on by default. To disable this we need to set
representation of the network and packets traversing RTS threshold to 3000, which is, enable RTS only when
through the network. It helps to have cursory glance and packet size is 3000, which will be never.
deduce some events happening in the simulation. Now in next sections we do simulations with above
Figure1 shows a example of graphical representation of settings. First we will see how RTS/CTS affects the
a wired network. system and how effective is it. And next we will see how
contention window affects the throughput of a five-node
network.

IV. SIMULATIONS
In this section, we will see some few simulation
scenarios to understand these networks in detail. First we
will see a simple scenario of four nodes where adjacent
nodes are in range to one another. Then we will simulate

Figure1 Example of a NAM trace

Final tool that can be helpful in analyzing data from

NS-2 is X-Graph. Using some special agents like Loss 5 nodes scenario. These simulations used bit rate of
Monitor we can generate trace files of specific sinks Figure 3: four node Simulation setup
with information on packets received and drops at that 54mbps. RTS is on by default in NS-2, in order to
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disable it I set the RTS threshold as 3000. This means
that RTS is switched on only when packet size is more
than 3000, which will be never.
In first simulation as been told previously 4 nodes are
present. Topology size is 600x600 and nodes are placed
with 250 units of distance separating them. In figure 3,
We can see the arrangement.
All nodes are connected to a TCP agent with a
constant bit rate. In this simulation we are going to look
it to how ongoing transmissions affect each other even if
RTS/CTS is present. To see how this affects the packets
we simply look how many packets are lost and reached
at respective nodes.
To do this we add an agent called loss monitor to the
destination nodes. Loss monitor simply counts the
packets, which were received or lost due to insufficient
queue in the system. We capture this data in to a trace
file. We load these files using x-graph and we see the
statistics of the system.
The first configuration is one where we connect node
1 to node 3 and node 3 to node 2. The simulation is done
for 10 secs. In figure 4 we can see the results with
RTS/CTS off.
Figure 4: X-graph with RTS/CTS off
Here in figure 4 we have 4 lines. Red one and light
green denote packet received and lost at node 3 and blue
4
and yellow show packets received and lost at node 2.
here we can see node 2 had pretty much perfect
transmission. While node 3 did not have perfect
transmission in fact it lost quite an amount of packets.
This is because node 2 is a busy receiving packet from 3
and queue at 1 gets full and packets start dropping. Now
we may expect RTS/CTS may improve this situation. In
next simulation RTS/CTS was on.
In figure 5 we see the statistics with RTS/CTS on .H
ere we see even more degradation of service here.
RTS/CTS is not failing in prevention of collisions but in
the aim of stopping the collisions its keeping the nodes
in waiting. The reason here is nodes need to wait extra
time to start their transmission. This gives node to not
transmit when node is busy. But it doesn't make a
difference since they are interfering with each other and
packets are being lost because queues are getting filled.
As you can see even node 2 saw loss of packets, which
was, not see previously. Here because of the entire
waiting involved queue get full and packets start to drop.
Figure 5: X-graph with RTS/CTS off
So in previous simulations we saw that RTS/CTS on
doesn't guarantee a perfect transmission and in fact it
reduced the throughput of the system. In practical
conditions RTS/CTS is not kept on. 802.11 networks are
usually installed in homes and small business. These
networks usually are small and nodes are with in the
range. And most of the time these nodes interact with a
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centralized access point, which has the information of all
nodes, which are in range.
In this next simulation we want to see how contention
window size affects the wireless networks. For this
simulation we used a new network topology. Here
system was designed in such a way that nodes may have
to wait for transmissions. Here node 1 was at the center
of the topology. It had no sinks or agents attached to it.
Remaining nodes were placed as shown in figure 6.
Figure 6 Simulation setup -5nodes
The reason for this placement was any transmission
had to go through node 1. All the reaming nodes were
not in range of each other while node 1 was in range to
all nodes. This meant nodes needed to fight for their
channel with competing transmissions. We can add
multiple connections between these nodes to increase
contention. But large number of parallel connections can
make them interfere with each other too often as we
have seen previously leading to very congested
environment. I setup this simulation with 3-connection
happening. In the beginning all of them were UDP. The
connection details are:
• Node 0 to Node 2
• Node 0 to Node 3
• Node 4 to Node 2
• Packet Size 1000 and Packet Interval: 0.001
In previous sections we have seen how contention
window mechanism works. Here for this experiment I
have set CWmin = CWmax = CW. Now we know that
contention window size have their affect on throughput.
Now stations have to choose from a random window
size to wait out till they can again contend for
transmission. Larger wait times reduce the chance a node
gets to transmit.
5
Table 1: Contention Window and Throughput
Contention Window Size Throughput (bytes/sec)
2 225120
7 516651
15 523562
31 489327
64 444559
128 321562
1024 75723
In table1, we will see effective throughput of the
system varying with contention window size. Effective
throughput of the system here is calculated by obtaining
total number of packets received by all receivers at
AGENT level and divided by total simulation. The
reason we count packets that reached AGENT level is
these are the effectively useful packets where as packets
reaching MAC level contain ACKs an some times RTS
and CTS if it on. Calculation of these packets in case of
TCP becomes tricky since they too involve some ACK
reaching that level. Since we have all UDP here we do
not have to worry about them now.
As we can see in the table contention window sizes
used are 2, 7, 15, 31, and 64. We can clearly see that
contention window size of 15 gives us the best
throughput. Contention window size of 31 is not far way
and is within acceptable range. This falls in line with
expectations from previous sections. The topology used
here is small with only 5 nodes. Smaller contention
window size means nodes get relatively smaller time to
wait and which is perfect for this setup. With more
number of nodes contention window size of 15 means
that when slot time ends many of them may collide
again. As we can see, the throughput of the system falls
down miserably as window size increases to 1024.
In table 2 we will see throughput values along with
contention window values with RTS/CTS on. Now as
we can see throughput values have decreased but still
CW value of 15 has higher throughput with 31 following
close behind. This tells us that RTS/CTS doesn’t affect
contention window size throughput. This expected since
RTS/CTS values are sent through SIFS and have no
affect on random selection of contention window.
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Table 2 Contention Window size and throughput With From the table we can see that window size of 15
RTS CTS gives us the best throughput followed by window size of
31. Here the effective throughput of the network is lower
Contention Window Size Throughput (bytes/sec) than UDP. This is because TCP has an
2 110520 acknowledgement system. This makes it more efficient
but also provides lesser throughput.
7 295679 Finally I conducted simulations with different values
15 299081 for CWmin and CWmax. Since these can be a huge set
31 288801 of combinations here I just simulated for some
combinations. Table 6 shows us those values. These
64 271999
values are again for a system with complete UDP
128 210920 network.
Table 6
1024 66922
CW min CW max Throughput

But the reduction in throughput reinforces the 2 31 268281

previous simulation data. Previously we just looked in to
data that had MAC layer packets. Now as we see there is
a substantial knock on the collective throughput of the
system. The switching off of RTS/CTS in smaller
networks is a good idea for this reason. Physical carrier
sense can handle this system in these smaller networks.
In the next simulation I changed the agents from UDP
to TCP. Here while analyzing the trace file we need to
see that since TCP ensure successful transmission we
start to see ACK packets in AGENT layer of nodes.
Initially when I did my simulations I was unaware of this
and was wondering the reason for noticing packets at
source of the traffic after fixing this problem in AWK
files finally I was able to undertake the simulation.
Connection characteristics of this simulation are:
• Node 0 to Node 2
• Node 0 to Node 3
• Node 4 to Node 2
• Packet Size 1000 and Packet Interval: 0.001
The only difference from previous simulation is that the
traffic source is a TCP agent. Table 3 shows the
throughput values with changing contention window
sizes with RTS/CTS off.
Table 3
Contention Window Throughput
2 238004
15 305682
31 313800
64 291360
128 186081
7 31 528240
15 128 520799
15 31 522200
These values are not much different from the values
we obtained in previous UDP simulation. But one reason
may be for this presence of fewer nodes. In cases with
large number of nodes this strategy can improve
bandwidth. But from these simulations one thing stands
out, optimum throughput for a given contention window
size is at 15 to 31. Our simulations showed very less
difference between these values and were closer than
any other values we have seen.
802.11 uses 31 as default value this may be because
standard was developed so that it can scale for more
nodes rather than a size like a five node system.
V. FUTURE WORK
Optimum Contention window size decision is an
ongoing research in wireless field. This has also
implications in fields of power line also. One path that
can be taken is to develop a dynamic methodology of
selecting contention window size and implement in the
wireless stack of NS-2. These simulations can be
approximated to application of the plan to practical
802.11 networks.

1024 41096
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VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have looked in to the inner workings of
802.11 networks. These networks have become
widespread in present day world. These networks make
communication possible through a highly noisy
environment. These concepts have been applied and
extended to advanced technologies like power line. We
studied the use of DCF and PCF in resolving contention
for channels. Ns-2 was used to simulate the wireless
networks. The results showed that for a 5-node network
a contention window size of 15 was optimum with 31
also being very close to the optimal value.

REFERENCES
[1] http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/tutorial/ Marc Greis
Ns-2 Tutorial
[2] http://www.cse.msu.edu/~wangbo1/ns2/ Network
Simulator-2
[3] http://old.nabble.com/Network-Simulator-ns-2-
f15582.html Ns-2 Forum
[4] http://www.ieee802.org/11/ 802.11 Forum
[5] http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/802.11.html
802.11 standards
[6] Wireless Communications Rappaport
[7] http://evanjones.ca/ns2/ Ns-2 Tutorial
[8] Effects of contention window and packet size on the
energy efficiency of wireless local area network
[9] On the Effect of Contention-Window Sizes in IEEE
802.11b Networks by Sachin garg, Martin Kappes,
A.S Krishna Kumar
[10] Effect of the contention window size on
performance and fairness of the IEEE 802.11
standard Azade Khalaj, Nasse Yazdani, Maseud
Rahgozar
[11] http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~zhibinwu/html/net
work_simulator_2.html Rutgers Lab on Wireless
NS-2
[12] http://www.joshuarobinson.net/docs/ns-
802_11b.html Ns-2 Guide