Active Signaling for 802.11 Networks in the ns-3 Simulator

In wireless networks, wireless channels are often shared between multiple nodes, which may interfere when they transmit simultaneously. The media access control (MAC) scheme coordinates channel access between the different nodes. In this article, we focus one specific method of channel access, Elimination-Yield Non-Preemptive Priority Multiple Access, EYNPMA, which is part of the European standard wireless HIPERLAN [1]. EY-NPMA is a wireless MAC method that partly relies on “active signaling”: i.e. transmitting (activity) to simply signal a node’s presence (with pseudo-noise), rather than transmitting data (bits). In this article, we study the adaptation of EY-NPMA named Ey-Wifi as an extension of the 802.11-based standards. Our main focus is the implementation of a such an extension in a module of the network simulator, ns-3, with the emphasis on the software architecture.