Mobile Ad-hoc Network Simulators , a Survey and Comparisons

Wireless communication technologies have been making growing interest in the past years, which has resulted in many proposals of their new applications. From indoor wireless local area networks to outdoor cellular mobile networks, wireless networks have gained billions of users around the world. A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is the active research topic in wireless communications; it is a collection of two or more nodes in which the communication links are wireless; without the service of any fixed infrastructure or centralized administrator. Research on MANET depends on the following techniques Analytical model, Emulation, Testbed and Simulation to evaluate the behavior and the performance of its communications protocol. The simulator assists the network developer to check whether the network is able to work in the real time. So when beginning to work with MANET, it is significant to select a simulation environment that will be up to requirements and will grant the researchers to conduct experiments in a given area. There are many different MANET simulators available; it is extremely complicated to choose an appropriate tool for performance testing without the complete analysis of existing tools. In this paper, we introduce the main characteristics of different simulator and look at their advantages and disadvantages. We hope this survey be a well reference source for those researchers who feel difficult to select the appropriate network simulators for their research.