Having found a new simulation library the other week, I spent the weekend installing and modifying the samples to get some statistics for some experiments I need to run.

The library is ns-miracle for NS-2. It’s a cross-layer messaging and dynamic module loading extension to the popular open source networking research tool. It has the UMTS Eurane extension as well as some extensions to the propagation models. I like the way you can build a network stack – very configurable and extendible. I’m thinking this could be useful to extending my research – but maybe after my thesis.

Installation was relatively straightforward on my Ubuntu laptop, using the website documentation. Even though I’d not used NS-2 for a few years, I did not take long to understand the code and make a few modifications to the samples for WLAN and UMTS simulation. It does take some reading of the source code to understand the way they use the tracing.

For now, I’ll write some scripts and analyse some traces to get signal and QoS statistics for WLAN and UMTS. I’ll post some scripts up on IntStack once I’m comfortable with them. Further work could involve integrating my Python code as a module and use cross-layer messages to perform events and actions on other parts of the stack. Also, it would be interesting to see how the results compare with other simulators like Opnet and NCTUns.