ELEC 6851

QualNet Project Phase I

Due Date and time: November 17, 2023, Friday, 11:59pm
Late submission penalty: There will be late submission penalty
of 10% per day. No submissions will be accepted four days after
the deadline.

Assignment may be done individually or in groups of two, in the latter

case single report should be submitted. If you decide to do in groups of
two, you will have to find a partner. The report should be submitted on
Moodle. Following submission of the report, check Moodle whether the
report is indeed there.
Qualnet Tutorial: Assignment is based on the QualNet Software. You should go
through the Qualnet tutorial before you begin the assignment.

The Qualnet Software is available on the computers in rooms H915, H917, H921
and EV 9.245. The instructions how to connect to those computers can be found at
the following link,

https://www.concordia.ca/ginacody/aits/support/faq/connect-from-home.html

The names of the computers in those rooms can also be found from the above link.

The assignment involves creation and simulation of a wireless network. The assignment
consists of two parts and their descriptions are given below,

- Part I.

- Create a single wireless subnetwork with three nodes.

- Nodes should be randomly placed. All the nodes located in the subnetwork should
be able to hear each other’s transmissions.
- Create three connections in the network as follows,

Transmit Node Receive Node

1 -> 2
2 -> 3
3 -> 1

- You should obtain results for without fading and shadowing at the physical layer.
 - Choose IEEE 802.11 as the MAC protocol in the network (Reference: Section 6.3
p.453 of the Textbook)
- Assume IPv4 as the network protocol.
- Assume that all the connections are using UDP as the transport protocol. The traffic
generated by the user is referred to as unicast traffic.
- Assume that the packet lengths are exponentially distributed in number of b bytes
per packet.
- Assume that the time interval between generation of the packets is exponentially
distributed with average duration of x seconds (Poisson arrival process).
- Choose a pair of values for b and x.
- Set the UDP connection time, CT, such that it will generate at least 1000packets,
CT > 1000x seconds. Choose the simulation run time, ST, such that ST > CT.
- During the simulation, the system also generates routing packets called broadcast
traffic in addition to the unicast traffic.

The assignment report should include the following information for Part I.,

1. The description of the network which includes,

i) Screen shot of the network that is readable.
ii) Average packet length and average time interval for packet generation
iii) Number of packets generated during simulation.

2. Include the output statistics file. A table where each row gives per node user packet
statistics from top to bottom layer as shown in Table I. Thus the number of user packets
received from the higher layer and number of user packets sent to the lower layer at each
layer should be entered to the table. Note that the user packets are referred to as unicast
traffic in QualNet.
 Function Traffic Nodes
Layer
type 1 2 3
unicast
Application sent
broadcast
unicast
received
broadcast
Transport
unicast
Table sent
broadcast
I. unicast
received
broadcast
Network
unicast
sent
broadcast
unicast
received
broadcast
unicast
MAC broadcast
sent ACK
RTS
CTS
unicast
broadcast
received ACK
RTS
CTS
Physical
unicast
broadcast
sent ACK
RTS
CTS
Number of Unicast and Broadcast packets received by each layer from the
layer above and sent to the layer below by each transmitting node.
 Traffic Nodes
Layer Function
type 1 2 3
unicast
Application received
broadcast
unicast
sent
broadcast
Transport
unicast
received
broadcast
unicast
sent
broadcast
Network
unicast
received
broadcast
unicast
sent
broadcast
unicast
MAC broadcast
received ACK
RTS
CTS
unicast
broadcast
sent ACK
RTS
CTS
Physical
unicast
broadcast
received ACK
RTS
CTS
Table 2. Number of Unicast and Broadcast packets received by each layer from
the layer below and sent to the layer above by each receiving node.
3. If the number of packets received and sent by a layer is not equal to each other it means
that either packet fragmentation or re-assembly has occurred in the layer. In such cases,
determine the number of fragmented or re-assembled packets.

4. Explain the relationship between the numbers of ACK, RTS, CTS packets and number of
unicast packets by taking into account retransmissions.

5. Determine and explain packet losses at each layer.

6. Give an account of the number of signals transmitted and received at the physical layer at
each node. Note that each signal corresponds to a packet transmission or reception.

- Part II.

A packet may need to be retransmitted because of errors in the received packet. Packet
errors increase as the distance between transmitting and receiving nodes increase. A packet
will be lost when packet retransmission limit is exceeded and the packet has not yet been
transmitted. The packet drops in the network should increase with the increased distance
of the node 3. Change the position of node 3 in the network of Part I. such that the
distances from nodes 2 and 3 increase. A node may be moved by clicking on the arrowhead
selector and then left clicking the mouse on node 3 and dragging it. Note that forwarding
of the packets by nodes should be disabled as explained on p. 4 of the QualNet tutorial
under the heading Enable IP Forwarding.

Deliverables of Part I. should be repeated for Part II. in the report. The report should also
discuss whether or not the presented results are reasonable and account for all the packets
generated by all the nodes.

Note: Traffic generator client refers to the transmitting node in a connection,

while traffic generator server to the receiving node.