Abstract— In this paper, we present a new simulationplatform for complex, radio standard spanning mobile AdHoc networks. SimANet - Simulation Platform for AmbientNetworks - allows the coexistence of multiple radio moduleswith different communication technologies and protocolstacks within one node, which can be used concurrently. Bythe usage of efficient data structures like Randomised SkipQuadtrees, SimANet allows the analysis and evaluation oflarge scale, heterogeneous network topologies in both staticand dynamic simulation scenarios based on differentmovement models. The software design enables a modularextension with additional models for power consumption,communication complexity or barrier simulation.Furthermore, an integrated MPI library provides thepossibility to run distributed test cycles on parallelcomputing systems. Thereby, special sliding time windowalgorithms avoid the typical disadvantage of a slow networkinterconnection structure and allow a dynamic loadbalancing on the available hardware resources during theruntime. With the main focus on the evaluation of abstractmulti-interface, multi-standard communication concepts, wecompare the functionality and the complexity of SimANetwith well-known simulation tools like ns2-MIRACLE, ns2-NW-Node, OMNet++ and TeNS. Simulation results fordifferent application scenarios estimate features likeversatility, practicality or usability in large scale networktopologies with up to 105 nodes.

Index Terms — simulation framework, parallelisation,wireless communication standards, mobile Ad Hoc networks,multi-standard, multi-interface, ambient networking

Cite: Matthias Vodel, Matthias Sauppe, Mirko Caspar, and Wolfram Hardt, "– SimANet – A Large Scalable, Distributed Simulation Framework for Ambient Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 3, no.7, pp. 11-19, 2008.