Simulator vs. Reality in Wireless Networks

Your network simulations are probably lying to you. Researchers ran a simple wireless

network in a simulator and it looked perfect. But when they built it with real hardware, the performance

was terrible. The problem? The simulator was too optimistic. It ignored real-world

delays. For instance, they tried sending data every 5 milliseconds. The simulation said

"no problem," but the real hardware physically needed almost 8 milliseconds just to send a single

packet. It couldn't keep up. The simulator's radio timings were

also completely wrong. Once they tuned the simulation to match the actual

hardware, the results finally got closer to reality.