Friday, May 29, 2009

OPNET Modeler Popular Comercial Network Simulator

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.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

NSBM - Network Simulation By Mouse

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.

JNS JAVA Network SImulator

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?