GUI Development

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.