Step 11. Adding obstacles to the environment¶
Goals¶
In an attempt to make our simulation both more realistic and more interesting, we add some obstacles to the playground.
In the real world, objects like walls, trees, buildings, and hills act as obstacles to radio signal propagation. They absorb and reflect radio waves, reducing signal quality and decreasing the chance of successful reception.
In this step, we add a concrete wall to the model that sits between
hosts A and R1 and see what happens. Since our model still uses
the unit disk radio and unit disk wireless medium models that do not model
physical phenomena, obstacle modeling will be very simple: all obstacles
completely absorb radio signals, making reception behind them
impossible.
The model¶
First, we need to represent obstacles. In INET, obstacles are managed as part of the PhysicalEnvironment module, so we need to add an instance to the WirelessB network:
network WirelessC extends WirelessB
{
submodules:
physicalEnvironment: PhysicalEnvironment {
@display("p=580,425");
}
}
Obstacles are described in an XML file. An obstacle is defined by its shape, location, orientation, and material. It may also have a name, and one can define how it should be rendered (color, line width, opacity, etc.) The XML format allows one to use predefined shapes like cuboid, prism, polyhedron or sphere, and also to define new shapes that may be reused for any number of obstacles. It is similar for materials: there are predefined materials like concrete, brick, wood, glass, forest, and one can also define new materials. A material is defined with its physical properties like resistivity, relative permittivity, and relative permeability. These properties are used in the computations of dielectric loss tangent, refractive index, and signal propagation speed, and ultimately in the computation of signal loss.
Our wall is defined in walls.xml, and the file name is given to
PhysicalEnvironment in its config parameter. The file contents:
<environment>
<object position="min 130 300 0" orientation="0 0 0" shape="cuboid 5 100 4"
material="concrete" fill-color="203 65 84" opacity="0.8"/>
</environment>
Having obstacles is not enough in itself; we also need to teach the
model of the wireless medium to take them into account. This is done by
specifying an obstacle loss model. Since our model contains
UnitDiskRadioMedium, we specify IdealObstacleLoss. With
IdealObstacleLoss, obstacles completely block radio signals, making
reception behind them impossible.
The IntegratedCanvasVisualizer we use as the visualizer
submodule in the network contains two submodules related to obstacles:
physicalEnvironmentVisualizer displays the obstacles themselves, and
obstacleLossVisualizer is responsible for visualizing the obstacle
loss of individual signals.
The wall in our simulation is at an elevation of 0m and is 4m high. So far the hosts (more precisely, their antennas) were at 0m elevation, the default setting; we change this to 1.7m so that the wall definitely blocks their signals.
The configuration:
[Config Wireless11]
description = Adding obstacles to the environment
extends = Wireless10
network = WirelessC
*.host*.mobility.initialZ = 1.7m
*.physicalEnvironment.config = xmldoc("walls.xml")
*.radioMedium.obstacleLoss.typename = "IdealObstacleLoss"
Results¶
At the beginning of the simulation, the initial route that was established in previous steps (A-R1-B) cannot be established, because the wall is between host A and R1. The wall is completely blocking transmissions, therefore AODV establishes the A-R2-R1-B route. Host R2’s transmission is cut when R2 moves behind the wall. This time, however, host R1 is available to relay host A’s transmissions to host B. A new route is formed, and traffic continues to use this route until host R1 moves out of communication range. After that, the A-R2-R3-B route is used, as seen in the previous steps.
Number of packets received by host B: 784
Sources: omnetpp.ini,
WirelessC.ned,
walls.xml