Accuracy-preserving measurement collection for realistic wireless simulations

The wireless research community continuously questions the accuracy and the validity of wireless simulation models. While this led to a shift to testbeds for experimental evaluation, wireless testbeds only provide evaluations in a well-defined set of scenarios. Furthermore, even for the deployment of limited scenarios, testbeds require a complete system setup, which is a time-consuming and challenging process. Hence, realistic simulation models are needed to get early performance results before going through the tedious work involved with testbed experimentation. In our prior work, we proposed the Berlin Open Wireless Lab (BOWL) Indoor Model (BIM) [1] to improve the accuracy of physical (PHY) layer simulation models. In this paper, we propose an optimization to the BIM model (OptBIM), which reduces the measurement complexity to build the model. We validate both BIM and OptBIM at the PHY and transport layers. We see that OptBIM shows similar performance to BIM at the PHY and transport layers. Also, the total number of measurements necessary was reduced by at least 18%. The improvement comes from reducing the number of measurements by 8 times (e.g., from 144 to 18 in our study).