A Survey of Network Simulators Supporting Wireless Networks

This paper contains a survey about network simulators supporting wireless networks. It aims to find a wireless network simulator which would help researchers develop and analyze simulation models in a reliable and not-too-complex way. So, it describes four popular network simulators, i.e. J-Sim, OM- NeT++, ns-2 and OPNET Modeler, and includes information about each one's abilities, internal structure, development environment, support for wire-less network simulation, documentation and graphical user interface. It depicts strengths and weaknesses of the simulators and gives several comparisons of them based on a number of papers and surveys. Finally, the paper concludes by presenting two simulators which seem to comply more with the needs of researchers studying on wireless networks.