Network Simulations and installation of NS2 and NS3

First thing which comes to the mind of new researcher is "What actually the simulation is, why to go for simulation, and how it is different from real implementation..??"

Simulation is the process of creating virtual working environment with the help of some software/tools for which the real implementation might be costlier, infeasible. The software/tools which provides these environments are known as simulators. Simulators provides cheap, repeatable and flexible environment for testing or designing of new protocols. See the difference between simulation and emulation at http://researchbyomesh.blogspot.in/2015/01/critical-differences-of-it-domain.html?m=1

So network simulators are the tools which provides the functionality of network with the help of programming. You can easily design, test or enhance the functionality of any protocol to see its effect on the outcome. The output of simulation depends upon the functionality of the simulator.

For network simulations, there are lots of tools available online for research, out of those i recommend NS2/NS3 for academic research purpose due to its open source and easy to enhance structure.

First I will be discussing about NS2. For details of ns2 please refer this post or link

NS2 is a simulation tool which is easy to configure on linux operating systems. I use Ubuntu-12.04 LTS version for installation. The commands for ns2- installation are:

1. Open the terminal and run:
           sudo apt-get update
   it will ask for you password, enter your password, and your system will be updated. Make sure that you are connected to the network.
2. Next commands to run are:
          sudo apt-get install tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev
          sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake
          sudo apt-get install libxt-dev libx11-dev libxmu-dev
3. Now download the online available opensource package "ns-allinone-2.35.tar.gz" and untar it and save it to you home directory.
4. Go to this package via terminal:
         cd ns-allinone-2.35
5. Now in this directory you will find an executable by with the name "install", run it
        ./install
    it can take some time.
6. After successful execution of this command go to ns-2.35 directory:
       cd ns-2.35
7. and now run the following commands one by one:
       ./configure
       make
       sudo make install
8. If all these commands ran successfully, it means you have configured the ns package correctly.
9. Now install some packages to make it executable:
      sudo apt-get install ns2
      sudo apt-get install nam
      sudo apt-get install xgraph
      sudo apt-get install gawk
10. Now you are completely done...
11. To check some running tcl scripts, go to the ns-allinone-2.35/ns-2.35/tcl/ex, and run:
       ns file_name.tcl

Note: If your Ubuntu version is 14.04 or higher, then nam may not run properly ( Most probably it will show the segmentation fault / core dumped while running nam). It is can be resolved by moving your binary file of nam to /usr/local/bin directory. For this you need to go to your nam-1.x.x folder inside your ns-allinone package and run the command:

      sudo cp nam /usr/local/bin

12. After successfully running the program, the output comes in trace file (.tr). It is a formatted text file where every column has its specific meaning. By analyzing the trace files using awk script coding you can get the throughput, delay, packet-loss and other network performance parameters.

A sample program to learn how to use ns2 and analyzing it with awk can be found here

If there is some problem of tclcl.h not found during installation, then refer this link. There are many other problems during NS-2 installation. For all those i am going to extend the article very soon.

12. Enjoy Network Simulation...

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Installation steps for NS3: 

Follow the given steps for the installation of NS-3. First install some dependencies to enable the NS-3 execution environment on your Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machine.

1. sudo apt-get install gcc g++ python
2. sudo apt-get install gcc g++ python python-dev
3. sudo apt-get install mercurial
4. sudo apt-get install bzr
5. sudo apt-get install gdb valgrind
6. sudo apt-get install gsl-bin libgsl0-dev libgsl0ldbl
7. sudo apt-get install flex bison libfl-dev
8. sudo apt-get install g++-3.4 gcc-3.4
9. sudo apt-get install tcpdump
10.sudo apt-get install sqlite sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
11.sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev
12.sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-dev
13.sudo apt-get install vtun lxc
14.sudo apt-get install uncrustify
15.sudo apt-get install doxygen graphviz imagemagick
16.sudo apt-get install texlive texlive-extra-utils texlive-latex-extra
17.sudo apt-get install python-sphinx dia
18.sudo apt-get install python-pygraphviz python-kiwi python-
pygoocanvas libgoocanvas-dev
19.sudo apt-get install libboost-signals-dev libboost-filesystem-dev

Now download the package of NS-3 from its official website:

http://www.nsnam.org/ns-3-17/

Extract the downloaded package and go to it via terminal, then run some executable files given in subfolder:
    ./build.py
    ./test.py

Configure the waf using the following commands once during installation:
    ./waf configure
    ./waf
NS3 enables support for animation with the tools NetAnim and support for graphs using GnuPlot tool.
For enabling gnuplot run the commands:
    sudo apt-get install gnuplot
    sudo apt-get install gimp

To install NetAnim support run the commands:
Go to the NetAnim folder and run the following commands to enable support for animation tool:
   make clean
   qmake NetAnim.pro
   make
For details of NS-3 please refer the link: ns-3

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