Enabling cross layer design: adding the MadWifi extensions to Nsclick

Simulations have always been a very useful and powerful tool to study and develop networking protocols. ns-2 is one of the most commonly used open-source network simulators and many protocols have been evaluated with this tool. In order to bridge the gap between simulation and implementation on a real testbed, Nsclick was developed. Nsclick makes it possible to entirely reuse code between the ns-2 simulator and a testbed, based on the Click Modular Router. In the quest for high performance wireless networks, researchers have found that the layered architecture networks did not perform well enough. Therefore they focused their research on cross layer design techniques. Although using Click and the MadWifi driver gives us many possibilities to design and evaluate cross layer optimizations in a testbed set up, the Nsclick platform does not support these extensions. In this paper we will introduce an extension to ns-2 which overcomes these shortcomings of the Nsclick platform. This extension makes the wireless features of the Click Modular Router available in Nsclick platform, eliminating the differences between the ns-2 simulator, within the Nsclick platform, and a real world set up.