Deploying a real IEEE 802.11e testbed to validate simulation results

The IEEE 802.11e technology is receiving much interest due to the enhancements offered to wireless local area networks in terms of QoS. Other application fields for this technology are wireless ad-hoc networks, wireless mesh networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks. In the literature, most of the research works available focusing on the IEEE 802.11e technology offer simulation results alone, being hard to find empirical results of real implementations. Additionally, we consider that the IEEE 802.11e implementation on simulation platforms has not been thoroughly validated using real-life results. In this work we analyze the performance of the IEEE 802.11e technology in a real multi-hop ad-hoc network testbed, comparing the results obtained with those of the ns-2 simulation platform. Experimental results show a significant consistency in terms of overall trends, although remarkable differences can be appreciated in terms of both delay and throughput results. In general, we find that simulation-based results are always optimistic compared to real testbed performance.