Wireless and mobile technologies and protocols and their performance evaluation

Wireless and mobile technologies have experienced exponential growth over the last decade. In fact, cellular networks have experienced four generations of technology revolution, namely from 1G to 4G. In addition, wireless local area networks (LANs) are presently poised to supplement wired networks in most developed countries as well as in many developing ones. The main goal of an evolution to another technology is to offer a considerable improvement in the performance by enabling wireless devices to access the Internet and multimedia applications in an efficient manner, improving security services, defining a set of quality of service enhancements, among others. In this chapter, we cover the evolution of the wireless and mobile networks, their basic principles of operation, and their architectures. The chapter also presents various network layer protocols and details a comprehensive taxonomy of simulation tools. An analysis and comparison between different simulators is made. Finally, we present a simulation case study to show the influence of mobility models and the role of modeling and simulation to predict the performance of wireless and mobile systems.