Error analysis in accelerated session-level MANET simulations

Simulation investigations form a vital part of networking research, and have long been used by the research community interested in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to design protocols and to evaluate quality of service mechanisms. Many MANET simulators developed so far model the network with high granularity in order to ensure the accuracy of the simulation results. But those tools are often too computationally expensive to simulate large-scale MANETs. This paper reports a new session-level MANET simulator and develops an error analysis approach which uniquely allows for optimal parameterization of the time-stepping simulation methods. The novelty lies in broadening the simulation acceleration method, model abstraction, to MANET simulation. At the same time the methodological challenges of validation are addressed through both analytical and experimental approaches. The proposed techniques were implemented in SSIM, a session-level simulator for MANETs. The experimental results show that the proposed accelerated simulation solution achieves significant acceleration by reducing the number of events, and the wall-clock simulation time, while retaining excellent accuracy.