Simulate congestion and drop packets at WiFi AP
Joseph
My boss has ordered me to simulate congestion using NS3. He said he wants it at the MAC or Phy level to drop packets. I am not sure if he knows what he is talking about, and he has no experience with NS3 but he swears it will do the job. I also have no experience with NS3. The more I read the documentation and forums it seems that congestion is a problem.
I am trying to simulate the scenario where our infrastructure has remained the same but there is an explosion in the number of devices accessing that infrastructure (IoT, think billions of devices suddenly trying to access the same old infrastructure). We are trying to use this kind of simulation to show Washington DC politicians that we (as a country) need to allocate a huge fund to build out and update the countries wired and wireless infrastructure so that it can handle the billions of devices coming online in the next 5-10 years.
To do this I have a script that has one device and one wifi access point. It is a UDP echo kind of program where they just send bits back and forth. My boss wants me to keep adding devices to the same wifi access point until it is congested and starts dropping packets. My boss thinks this will just automatically happen, but so far I have been unsuccessful at creating congestion that results in packets being dropped. Will messing with the Traffic Control or Queues give me the congested behavior I seek? Is NS3 even the right tool for this kind of IoT congestion modeling? Are there any examples in ns-3-allinone/ns-3.28/examples/ that I could use to start with or that do what I am seeking?
The idea is to have a wifi access point in a smart city get overrun by a huge amount of people on their way to lunch while streaming HD video. I am open to any ideas, hopefully using NS3, on how to show/prove to these politicians that adding more devices to our networks without correspondingly increasing our network capacities will result in huge loss or denial of service. It is so obvious that it is frustrating, yet still, I have to prove the obvious to these politicians.
Any guidance, ideas, or opinions are greatly appreciated! I am not a very smart or experienced person so please excuse my lack of understanding and thanks for your time.
Cheers,
Joe