Media Independent Handover and Mobile IPv6-Based UDP Performance Evaluation Suite for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Simulation is a cost-effective, simple, and straightforward approach to implementing a system for exhaustive analysis. Many commercial and open-source simulators, such as NS2, NS3, OMNET++, OPNET, QualNet, etc., exist in the literature to simulate wired and wireless networks. However, the major challenge in dealing with open-source simulators is analysing the results and presenting their performance metrics. Further, the ever-increasing demands of the users in terms of higher data rates with uninterrupted connections resulted in a heterogeneous wireless network (HWN) that supports the integration of WiFi, WiMAX, LTE, etc. Amongst all network simulators available in the literature, NS2 and NS3 are the most popularly used by the research community because of their immense support for implementing and verifying innovative networking algorithms. Furthermore, with the contribution of the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), NS2 supports the simulation of WiFi and WiMAX heterogeneous wireless networks with Media Independent Handover and Mobile-IPv6 which is yet to be supported entirely by NS3. However, the major shortcoming of NIST's contribution is the ease of developing a simulation script followed by result analysis. In continuation with the NIST's contribution, this paper proposes a Graphical User Interface-based evaluation suite (ES) for the simulation of User Datagram Protocol applications' in HWN, referred to as ES-HWN. With the support of this suite, the research community can quickly develop the heterogeneous wireless network simulation script followed by the textual and graphical results of handover, packets sent and received, throughput, packet delay, and jitter. The proposed ES-HWN supports the configuration of 10 WiFi and WiMAX interface mobile nodes with two WiFi-Access Points and a WiMAX-Base Station. Besides, it supports the configuration of UDP-based applications' packet size and transmission rate. Finally, over many experiments, ES-HWN exhibited 100% reliable results.