The Modelling and Hardware Validation of a Class of Low-Power MAC Protocols

Network simulators such as ns2 and Qualnet have traditionally been used to evaluate networking protocols, ranging across all the layers of the OSI seven layer model. However, for the simulator to correctly reflect the physical world, it had to be validated by correlating the output of the simulator with the results obtained from physical implementation. This paper presents the modelling of a class of low-power asynchronous medium access control (MAC) protocol known as SpeckMAC in the Qualnet simulator. The parameters for the model were based on the ProSpeckz platform which is a physically larger prototype of the Speck and which approximates the resources of the miniature Speck being developed as part of the speckled computing project. In order to validate the output of the simulator, an experiment was performed using a network of ProSpeckz, and the results from this physical experiment were compared against the outputs from the simulator for the same scenarios. The comparison demonstrated that the outputs of the simulator correlated closely with the results obtained from the physical devices. Once the models had been validated, simulations were performed to demonstrate the utility of the simulator in determining whether the SpeckMAC algorithms could support the traffic requirements of commonly used mobile ad-hoc network routing algorithms while duty-cycling the radio transceiver for energy-efficient operations.