A Performance Comparison of Network Simulators for Wireless Networks

Network simulation is the most useful and common methodology used to evaluate different network topologies without real world implementation. Network simulators are widely used by the research community to evaluate new theories and hypotheses. There are a number of network simulators, for instance, ns-2, ns-3, OMNET++, SWAN, OPNET, Jist, and GloMoSiM etc. Therefore, the selection of a network simulator for evaluating research work is a crucial task for researchers. The main focus of this paper is to compare the state-of-the-art, open source network simulators based on the following parameters: CPU utilization, memory usage, computational time, and scalability by simulating a MANET routing protocol, to identify an optimal network simulator for the research community.