[Ns-developers] Request to merge the timob wifiex project into main ns-3 repo

[Trevor Bosaw]

I've looked over the code located at:

http://code.nsnam.org/timob/ns-3-wifiex/

And I believe that the wifiex phy model is complementary to the main  
ns-3 wifi model, and that the two should be merged.  The main  
difference in the wifiex phy model and the main ns-3 repository is  
that it includes an improvement to the wifi state machine that allows  
for 'Capture Effect' implementation.

For those that don't know, the 'Capture Effect' in wifi is the ability  
of a receiver to synchronize to an incoming packet while it is already  
sync'ed to a packet, when the incoming packet's power is higher than  
that of the currently sync'ed packet, and is above a set threshold.   
Currently, ns-3's wifi node state machine drops any packet that is  
received while it is in the SYNC state (currently sync'ed to a  
packet). Not only does the wifiex phy model implement the 'Capture  
Effect', which more closely models actual receiver behavior, but it  
includes flags that can be set which reverts node state machine  
behavior back to how ns-3 main currently deals with things.

Most of the improvements in the wifiex project are located in the  
'ns2ext-wifi-phy.cc' file, under the 'StartReceivePacket' function.   
The code here is not too complicated, especially with anyone already  
familiar with the yans phy state machine, so I definitely recommend a  
quick perusal through the wifiex code.

If I get some agreement on this, I'll go ahead and prepare a patch to  
merge these two models.

-Trevor