How to measure channel idle time in veins?

Question

I need to calc the channel idle time in the Mac layer. I use veins-4a2.

Answer 1

The WLAN MAC module of Veins 4.3 (like 4a2) outputs a scalar called totalBusyTime, which gives you the accumulated number of seconds that the channel was busy during the simulation.

Thus, if your simulation runs for 100s and totalBusyTime gives you a value of 30s you will know that the MAC layer sensed the channel as idle for 70s (out of 100s).

Note that this is not to be confused with the WLAN PHY scalar busyTime, which gives you a very different metric of how busy the channel was (with 0% meaning always idle, 100% meaning always one frame that could have interfered, 200% meaning always two frames etc.)