A Flow-Level Wi-Fi Model for Large Scale Network Simulation

Wi-Fi networks are extensively used to provide Internet access to end-users and to deploy applications at the edge. By playing a major role in modern networking, Wi-Fi networks are getting bigger and denser. However, studying their performance at large-scale and in a reproducible manner remains a challenging task. Current solutions include real experiments and simulations. While the size of experiments is limited by their financial cost and potential disturbance of commercial networks, the simulations also lack scalability due to their models' granularity and computational runtime. In this paper, we introduce a new Wi-Fi model for large-scale simulations. This model, based on flow-level simulation, requires fewer computations than state-of-the-art models to estimate bandwidth sharing over a wireless medium, leading to better scalability. Comparing our model to the already existing Wi-Fi implementation of ns-3, we show that our approach yields to close performance evaluations while improving the runtime of simulations by several orders of magnitude. Using this kind of model could allow researchers to obtain reproducible results for networks composed of thousands of nodes much faster than previously.