Development of the smart QoS monitors to enhance the performance of the NS2 Network Simulator

Abstract

A widespread methodology for performance analysis in the field of communication systems engineering is network simulation. Network Simulator 2 (NS2) is one of the most popular tools in academia for evaluation of network, protocols and topologies. It has become virtually the standard of network simulation. It represents a discrete, event-based simulator that has an ability to be easily extendible and modifiable due to its open source nature. However, a major shortcoming of NS2 is its limited scalability in terms of memory usage and simulation run-time which get worsen due to further post processing of huge, multi-format output files. In this paper, to alleviate the short comings of ns2, we have developed two smart ‘quality of service’ (QoS) monitors for NS2. They produce a very small, well formatted output file for wired, wireless or hybrid networks, especially to evaluate the quality of service of any IP based network reducing the memory usage. In addition, the QoS monitors are capable of generating the user friendly graphical representation of throughput, jitter, loss probability and delay without any post processing which greatly reduces the post processing time also.