I have been looking for NS-3 tutorials on the net. After some searching I found out these two tutorial are quite good.
OPNET Modeler is one of famous simulation tools provided by OPNET Technologies.
OPNET is a commercial software unlike Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) & Network Simulator 3 (NS-3)
As far as I know, NS2 is based on descrete event-driven model , while OPNET engine is based on Finite State Machine combined with analytical model.
I have no particular experience about OPNET, but I'm searching for papers comparing NS-2 with OPNET. Sure both has their own disadvantages and advantages. And what about NS-3?
Hrm by the way, I need to find info about
1) Descrete event-driven model
2) Analytical Model
3) Finite State Machine Model
what does it really means?
Network simulation and network simulator area are very wide area. It is normal since network system (eg. Internet) is the biggest system ever created by human.
back to OPNET, , OPNET have more features than NS-2 but NS-2 is moreattractive due to its open source nature.
NSBM is another effort to ease NS2 usage.
" NSBM ("Network Simulation By Mouse") is a GUI that allows you to graphically develop simulation scenarios and then generate a tcl script. It requires java (1.4 recommended, it doesn't properly work with 1.5; here's a BETA version that should work with Java 1.5). The source code is also available - feel free to change it!"
I read the paper regarding NSBM. It is a very good effort actually to have this kind of GUI to help user develops network simulations. The GUI get good feedback from the target audience (Student). If you are new to NS2 I suggest that you use NSBM.
NS2 is claimed to be difficult to use. So thats why JNS is developed.
What is JNS?
This is the detail given by the oficail website of JNS.
http://jns.sourceforge.net/
"The Java Network Simulator is a Java implementation of the ns-2 simulator originally from Berkeley. It is by no means as complete as ns-2, but it is a lot more accessible to programmers not familiar with Object Tcl.
JNS allows developers of networking protocols to simulate their protocols in a controlled environment. The simulator then produces a trace file (same format as NAM trace files) which can be viewed in a network animator such as Javis. Below is a screen shot of a simulation run from JNS being animated in Javis."
I personally never used JNS since I have no problem with NS2. Is it really good?
Can the JNS catch up with NS-2 development?
Reference in networking area is Standard and RFC.
This is the RFC for some performance metrices:
RFC 2679 : One-way delay metrices
RFC 2680 : One-Way packet Loss Metrices
RFC 2678 : IPPM Metrtices for Measuring Connectivity
RFC 2330 : Framework for IPPM
RFC 2681 : Round Trip Delay Metric for IPPM
RFC 3393 : Packet Delay Variation Metric for IP Performance Metrics
When we conduct a simulation study , what we really want is the network performance of certain network.
There are four main basic parameter for network analysis
1) Delay
Measurement of how long the packet will travel from source to destinations
2) Jitter
Measurement of variations of delay
3) Packet Loss
Measurement how many packet dropped
4) Throughput
How many packets successfully sent to the
The network performance parameter can be measured at:
1) from end to end
2) between two nodes
The network performance can also be differentiated between traffic type or for all traffic.
Have you tried out NS-3?
This is what I got from http://www.nsnam.org/ official website of NS-3.
"ns-3 is intended as an eventual replacement for the popular ns-2 simulator. The project acronym “nsnam” derives historically from the concatenation of ns (network simulator) and nam (network animator). "
From user point of view, I noticed the main difference between NS-3 and NS-2 is the changes in language. Now NS-3 is using C++ and phyton, compared to NS-2 which used C and oTCL.
This means that for those who learn TCL for the sake of using NS-2 now need to learn other language for using NS-3.
Start from zero!