SIMULATION OF A MULTIHOP WIRELESS LAN USING OMNET++

This project serves as a study of implementing multihop design in wireless local area
network (WLAN) technology. The WLAN technology has seen a growth in
popularity over the past few years. This project is divided into two parts. The first
part of the project is to understand the theory behind the WLAN technology. Most of
the materials for this research are taken from lEEEXPLORE website and several
books on wireless LAN and wireless data structure. The fundamental of networking
that touches on OSI layer and data services are also studied. The second part of the
project concentrated on simulating the multihop design. The simulation method uses a
network simulator that can be found freely on the internet. The simulation is
important as we want to simulate the system that has been built and to see whether the
implementation is suitable or not. A good knowledge on C++ language is essential as
most of the building process to achieve a credible simulation uses C++ programming
codes. The network simulator offers a great dynamics to simulate the network and
results can be plotted easily. The main focus of this study is the wireless standard;
IEEE 802.11 that is used for wireless communication. The standard focuses on the
MAC and PHY layers for Access Point based networks and ad hoc networks. There
are certain objectives to be achieved which to study IEEE 802.11 WLANs standard;
to analyze the problems occurred in multihop design in WLANs and to design a
simulation platform to implement multihop design. The methodology used in this
project is simulation using OMNeT++. The result of the simulation showed in a
histogram of the node multihop between the nodes. From this project the possibilities
of implementing a multihop design in WLAN could be analyzed and further works
can be applied to improve its performance.