Code-transparent Discrete Event Simulation for Time-accurate Wireless Prototyping

Exhaustive testing of wireless communication protocols on prototypical hardware is costly and time-consuming. An alternative approach is network simulation, which, however, often strongly abstracts from the actual hardware. Especially in the wireless domain, such abstractions often lead to inaccurate simulation results. Therefore, we propose a code-transparent discrete event simulator that enables a direct simulation of existing code for wireless prototypes. With a focus on lower layers of the communication stack, we enable a parametrization of the simulation timings based on real-world measurements to increase the simulation accuracy. Our evaluation shows that we achieve close results for throughput (deviation below 3% for UDP and latency (corrected deviation about 13% compared to real-world setups, while providing the benefits of code-transparent simulation, i.e., to flexibly simulate large topologies with existing prototype code. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach finds implementation defects in existing hardware prototype software, which are otherwise difficult to track down in real deployments.