Improving wireless simulation through noise modeling

Abstract

We propose modeling environmental noise in order to efficiently and accurately simulate wireless packet delivery. We measure noise traces in many different environments and propose three algorithms to simulate noise from these traces. We evaluate applying these algorithms to signal-to-noise curves in comparison to existing simulation approaches used in EmStar, TOSSIM, and ns2. We measure simulation accuracy using the Kantorovich-Wasserstein distance on conditional packet delivery functions. We demonstrate that using a closest-fit pattern matching (CPM) noise model can capture complex temporal dynamics which existing approaches do not, increasing packet simulation fidelity by a factor of 2 for good links, a factor of 1.5 for bad links, and a factor of 5 for intermediate links. As our models are derived from real-world traces, they can be generated for many different environments.