Validation of the NS-3 Interference Model for IEEE802.11 Networks

This paper describes methodology, experiment configuration and final results from a set of measurements we executed in order to validate the interference model assumptions that are currently adopted when simulating OFDM-based wireless networks with NS-3, a widely used network simulation tool in academia. In order to do that we devised a measurement method that allows to reliably reproduce interfering signals with very high accuracy timing-relations between interfering OFDM frames. We present the measurement results that were gathered using this novel approach which provide detailed insight on the characteristics of current receiver implementations in terms of their capability to successfully decode OFDM-frames which are overlapped in time by one or more lower-power frames received on the same carrier frequency (commonly referred to as physical layer capture). Subsequently, we adapt the simulation model in order to reflect the observed capture capabilities and quantify the resulting impact on system level simulation results in a high-density VANET application scenario.