Testing Documentation

At present, most of the available documentation about testing and validation exists in publications, some of which are referenced below.

Error model

Validation results for the 802.11b error model are available in this technical report

Two clarifications on the results should be noted. First, Figure 1-4 of the above reference corresponds to the ns-3 NIST BER model. In the program in the Appendix of the paper (80211b.c), there are two constants used to generate the data. The first, packet size, is set to 1024 bytes. The second, “noise”, is set to a value of 7 dB; this was empirically picked to align the curves the best with the reported data from the CMU testbed. Although a value of 1.55 dB would correspond to the reported -99 dBm noise floor from the CMU paper, a noise figure of 7 dB results in the best fit with the CMU experimental data. This default of 7 dB is the RxNoiseFigure in the ns3::YansWifiPhy model. Other values for noise figure will shift the curves leftward or rightward but not change the slope.

The curves can be reproduced by running the wifi-clear-channel-cmu.cc example program in the examples/wireless directory, and the figure produced (when GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is enabled) is reproduced below in Figure Clear channel (AWGN) error model for 802.11b.

Clear channel (AWGN) error model for 802.11b

Validation results for the 802.11 OFDM error model are available in this technical report. The curves can be reproduced by running the ofdm-validation.cc example program in the examples/wireless directory, and the figure is reproduced below in Figure Frame error rate (NIST model) for OFDM Wi-Fi.

Frame error rate (NIST model) for OFDM Wi-Fi

MAC validation

Validation of the MAC layer has been performed in [baldo2010].