Validation of the ns-3 802.11s model and proposed changes compliant to IEEE 802.11-2012

The correct implementation of the protocols and proper exchange of messages is very important for an easy comparison of the results of real measurements and network simulations. This work shows the validation of the ns-3 802.11s mesh module with respect to the actual IEEE Standard 802.112012 [3] and proposes changes which are needed to get the ns-3 implementation compliant to the actual standard. The ns-3 802.11s mesh module is described in [1] and based on the IEEE 802.11s Draft Standard 3.0 (2009). Therefore several changes in the ns-3 mesh module are needed to cover the actual standard (e.g. Category and Action Values, Information Elements and Element ID, structure of the Peering Management frame, Mesh Configuration and the Path Error frame). As independent monitoring tool Wireshark is used to validate the protocol implementation in ns-3.22 as the Wireshark parser is covering the actual protocol implementation of IEEE 802.11-2012. The source of the proposed changes in ns-3.22, which are described in the following sections can be found in [2]. 1. ASSIGNMENT OF CATEGORIES AND ACTIONS Action Frames are a type of management frame used to trigger an action in the Network. In Mesh Networks, Management Frames of Type Action are used for the establishment of Peer Links according to the Peering Management Protocol and path selection according to the Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) (see [1] and [3]). The category value describes the action frame type (e.g. Block Ack, Mesh, Multihop and Self-protected as defined in [3] chap. 8.4.1.11 tab. 8-38). Important actions according to chap. 8.4.1.11, 8.5.16 and 8.5.17 of [3] are shown in Figure 1 (gray marked Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Workshop on ns-3 (WNS3) ’2015 Barcelona, Spain Copyright 20XX ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$15.00. squares are not implemented in ns-3 so far).