ns3-WiMacStat: Enabling In-Depth WiFi MAC Performance Analysis via RadioTap-Based Statistics
Chengxiang Mi, Jingyi Gu, Chengwei Zhang, Yayu Gao · 2025
As the WiFi standard continues to evolve, the medium access control (MAC) layer of WiFi is becoming increasingly intricate, thus necessitating detailed network simulations for optimization of various algorithms.To gain in-depth understanding of the simulation results, macro-level metrics such as throughput and delay are often insufficient, evaluating micro-level metrics including modulation and coding scheme (MCS), enqueue time and so forth are further crucial.To address this issue, this paper introduces ns3-WiMacStat, a comprehensive and user-friendly tool for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing WiFi MAC statistics within ns-3 simulations.Employing customized trace sources and sinks, ns3-WiMacStat collects 12 key metrics across PPDU, MPDU, and MSDU levels, storing them in a hierarchical database.These statistics are encoded into Pcap files with a customized RadioTap header.Experiment results show that 1) the accurate functionality of ns3-WiMacStat's statistic collection; and 2) neglected runtime overhead compared to standard ns-3 tracing, with a trade-off of increased memory usage.