Analyzing a self-organizing multi-hop protocol: Ease of simulations and need for real-world tests

Within this paper we describe our experience in evaluating the self-organizing MAC protocol EXTENDED-DESYNC for multi-hop wireless networks. Since this MAC protocol is based on the primitive of desynchronization, we are interested particularly in the transient response of the participating network devices due to topology dynamics. While real-world multi-hop testbeds can be hard to handle in a certain sense (monitoring and debugging can be difficult, reproducibility can be bad), simulations could be a more convenient choice for analysis. However, simulation models have to be validated to get plausible results. Thus we make use of both approaches and compare the results within this paper.