EuWIn is the \u201dEuropean Laboratory of Wireless
Communications for the Future Internet\u201d recently established
and funded under the umbrella of the EC FP7 Network of
Excellence on Wireless Communications, Newcom. The focus of
the EuWIn site in Bologna (Italy) is the Internet of Things. One
of its scopes is to set up a network composed of 100 radio devices
compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, flexible enough to
allow the development and testing of any routing algorithm
compatible with such a standard. This paper reports the first
comparison of results achieved through an NS-2 simulator
developed at LIMOS, CNRS (France), with those of the true
network available in Bologna. Results in terms of packet error
rate and overhead generated achieved through the two platforms,
implementing the same protocol stack, is shown. The differences
raised, concerning the practical issues normally not accounted
by the simulations, are carefully investigated and discussed