GUI Development

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The long term goal of this project is to build a tool which can be used to help researchers and students perform all the tasks in a network simulation workflow:

  • layout the network topology: describe the network nodes and their physical-layer connectivity
  • add capabilities to nodes:
    • mobility models which describe node movements over time.
    • ipv4/udp/tcp stack
    • MAC bridging stack
    • traffic generation and reception applications
    • routing daemons
  • configure each object in the system to setup its attributes to various values (set PHY tx level of node 4, etc.)
  • setup trace events you want to log
  • run simulation
  • analyse trace logs:
    • simple text-based analysis of packet traces
    • simple pcap-based analysis of packet traces
    • simple graphical analysis: ability to compute averages, distributions of observed variables, etc.

Some tools already exist which attempt to handle some or all of the above steps for some other network simulators:

  • omnet++ has an eclipse-based gui
  • opnet is a commercial tool with a free-for-research version which has a strong gui

Since building such a large tool is really a long-term project, the student should focus on identifying parts of the above workflow for which he wants to provide a gui. Special care should be put to:

  • figure out how the student's gui will fit in the long-term gui. i.e., ideally, the student would be able to describe what the long-term gui should look like and show how his component will fit in later.
  • figure out how the student's gui will fit in today's workflow.