5. Utilities

5.2. bench-scheduler

This tool is used to benchmark the scheduler algorithms used in ns-3.

5.2.1. Command-line Arguments

$ ./ns3 run "bench-scheduler --help"
bench-scheduler [Program Options] [General Arguments]

Benchmark the simulator scheduler.

Event intervals are taken from one of:
  an exponential distribution, with mean 100 ns,
  an ascii file, given by the --file="<filename>" argument,
  or standard input, by the argument --file="-"
In the case of either --file form, the input is expected
to be ascii, giving the relative event times in ns.

Program Options:
--all:     use all schedulers [false]
--cal:     use CalendarScheduler [false]
--calrev:  reverse ordering in the CalendarScheduler [false]
--heap:    use HeapScheduler [false]
--list:    use ListScheduler [false]
--map:     use MapScheduler (default) [true]
--pri:     use PriorityQueue [false]
--debug:   enable debugging output [false]
--pop:     event population size (default 1E5) [100000]
--total:   total number of events to run (default 1E6) [1000000]
--runs:    number of runs (default 1) [1]
--file:    file of relative event times
--prec:    printed output precision [6]

General Arguments:
...

You can change the Scheduler being benchmarked by passing the appropriate flags, for example if you want to benchmark the CalendarScheduler pass –cal to the program.

The default total number of events, runs or population size can be overridden by passing –total=value, –runs=value and –pop=value respectively.

If you want to use an event distribution which is stored in a file, you can pass the file option by –file=FILE_NAME.

–prec can be used to change the output precision value and –debug as the name suggests enables debugging.

5.2.2. Invocation

To run it, simply open the terminal and type

$ ./ns3 run bench-scheduler -- --runs=5

It will show something like this depending upon the scheduler being benchmarked:

bench-scheduler:  Benchmark the simulator scheduler
  Event population size:        100000
  Total events per run:         1000000
  Number of runs per scheduler: 5
  Event time distribution:      default exponential

ns3::MapScheduler (default)
Run #       Initialization:                     Simulation:
Time (s)    Rate (ev/s) Per (s/ev)  Time (s)    Rate (ev/s) Per (s/ev)
----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------
prime       0.01        1e+06       1e-06       5.51        1.81488e+06 5.51e-07
0           0           inf         0           6.25        1.6e+06     6.25e-07
1           0           inf         0           6.52        1.53374e+06 6.52e-07
2           0.01        1e+06       1e-06       7.28        1.37363e+06 7.28e-07
3           0           inf         0           7.72        1.29534e+06 7.72e-07
4           0.01        1e+06       1e-06       8.16        1.22549e+06 8.16e-07
average     0.004       nan         4e-07       7.186       1.40564e+06 7.186e-07
stdev       0.00489898  nan         4.89898e-07 0.715866    141302      7.15866e-08

Suppose we had to benchmark CalendarScheduler instead, we would have written

$ ./ns3 run bench-scheduler -- --runs=5 --cal"

And the output would look something like this:

bench-scheduler:  Benchmark the simulator scheduler
  Event population size:        10000
  Total events per run:         10000000
  Number of runs per scheduler: 5
  Event time distribution:      default exponential

ns3::CalendarScheduler: insertion order: normal
Run #       Initialization:                     Simulation:
Time (s)    Rate (ev/s) Per (s/ev)  Time (s)    Rate (ev/s) Per (s/ev)
----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------
prime       0.01        1e+06       1e-06       8.14        1.2285e+06  8.14e-07
0           0.01        1e+06       1e-06       17.14       583431      1.714e-06
1           0.02        500000      2e-06       23.33       428633      2.333e-06
2           0.02        500000      2e-06       33.2        301205      3.32e-06
3           0.03        333333      3e-06       42.98       232666      4.298e-06
4           0.05        200000      5e-06       57.1        175131      5.71e-06
average     0.026       506667      2.6e-06     34.75       344213      3.475e-06
stdev       0.0135647   271129      1.35647e-06 14.214      146446      1.4214e-06