3D Wireless: Modeling Wireless Performance by Combining Spatial and Temporal Behaviors

Abstract

Performance characterization is a fundamental issue in wireless networks for real time routing, wireless network simulation, and etc. There are four basic wireless operations that are required to be modeled, i.e., unicast, anycast, broadcast, and multicast. As observed in many recent works, the temporal and spatial distribution of packet receptions can have significant impact on wireless performance involving multiple links (anycast/broadcast/multicast). However, existing performance models and simulations overlook these two wireless behaviors, leading to biased performance estimation and simulation results. In this paper, we first explicitly identify the necessary "3-Dimension" information for wireless performance modeling, i.e., packet reception rate (PRR), PRR spatial distribution, and temporal distribution. We then propose a comprehensive modeling approach considering 3-Dimension Wireless information (called 3DW model). Further, we demonstrate the generality and wide applications of 3DW model by two case studies: 3DWbased network simulation and 3DW-based real time routing protocol. Extensive simulation and testbed experiments have been conducted. The results show that 3DW model achieves much more accurate performance estimation for both anycast and broadcast/multicast. 3DW-based simulation can effectively reserve the end-to-end performance metric of the input empirical traces. 3DW-based routing can select more efficient senders, achieving better transmission efficiency.