Before starting the simulation, it is important to study the simulation environment, the
simulation parameters and the performance metrics used during this simulation. Section
4.6.2.1 describes the simulation environment (i.e the simulator used, no. of nodes etc) and the
parameters values. Section 4.6.2.2 describes the metrics used to evaluate the proposed
protocol. Section 4.6.2.3 presents and discusses the results obtained for the proposed
protocol.
4.6.2.1 Simulation Environment
One of the important things in simulation is to choose the appropriate simulator to test the
proposed protocol. At network environment, the simulator to be used can be OPNET, own
developed simulator or ns2. In this thesis, ns2 simulator is selected because this simulator is
widely used in proposed network protocols, the existence of many previously implemented
protocols, the simplicity in creating scenario and the ability to run under different platforms.
The reason for not selecting OPNET is that we noticed that this simulator is not ideal for
implementing the multicast protocols especially ad hoc protocols. Designing and developing
a new simulator needs a lot of time and it will not be very useful to be used in other
previously proposed protocols.
So the proposed protocol is implemented using ns2 simulator [1] (version 2.29). The
simulation environment consists of 60 nodes, these nodes represent the number of LMRs,
and each LMR can carry any number of receivers depending on its configuration. In our
simulation, each LMR can connect up to 10 receivers so the maximum number of receivers is
600 nodes. The number of multicast group members (LMRs) varies from 5, 10, 15, 20, 25,
30, 35, 40, and 45 nodes; these nodes represent LMRs in SReM and Designated Router (DR)
for xcast+ protocol.
Traffic generation considered at this simulation is CBR traffic with payload size 512 bytes.
Data packets are generated at source at a rate of 8 packets per second; this will introduce
4096 byte per second. Each simulation runs for 200 second.
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