About

This project is a framework for assesing the performances of the SCTP, DCCP, TCP and UDP network transport-layer protocols during scenarios in which multiple client network nodes stream data to a central server. It uses the network simulator NS-3 and the associated DCE framework to simulate client/server applications which generate network traffic. For the DCCP, TCP and UDP protocols, the standard Linux kernel implementations are used, while the SCTP protocol uses the external library called lksctp.

Dependencies

Using Ubuntu 14.04, install the dependencies:

apt-get install gcc g++ python python-dev qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev mercurial bzr cmake \
                libc6-dev libc6-dev-i386 g++-multilib gsl-bin libgsl0-dev libgsl0ldbl \
                flex bison libfl-dev tcpdump sqlite sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libxml2 \
                libxml2-dev libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-dev vtun lxc doxygen graphviz imagemagick \
                git python-pygraphviz python-pygoocanvas libpcap-dev libdb-dev libssl-dev \
                lksctp-tools libsctp-dev tshark gnuplot

Optional: apt-get install python-pygccxml, but having it installed may cause build errors...

Building NS-3 with DCE

First, install the Bake build tool. In a terminal, change to the directory in which you wish to install it, then run

hg clone http://code.nsnam.org/bake bake
export BAKE_HOME=`pwd`/bake
export PATH=$PATH:$BAKE_HOME
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$BAKE_HOME

Create a directory in which to download and build the DCE variant of NS-3. At the time of writing, 1.7 was the latest stable version.

mkdir dce
cd dce
bake.py configure -e dce-linux-1.7
bake.py download
bake.py build -vvv

If you get a bulid error about compiler problems,

/home/user/dce/source/net-next-sim-2.6.36/include/linux/compiler-gcc.h:90:30: fatal error: linux/compiler-gcc5.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated.

then add compiler-gcc5.h to source/net-next-sim-2.6.36/include/linux/compiler-gcc5.h

Link to the original installation instructions.

Required system settings

Most Linux systems place restrictions on how many user processes can be run at the same time, and how many files each process can open. This project needs to run multiple NS-3 simulation instances in order to generate useful network statistics, which creates a lot of files and processes. Therefore it is necessary to append the following lines to the end of /etc/security/limits.conf:

*         hard    nproc       65536
*         soft    nproc       65536
*         hard    nofile      65536
*         soft    nofile      65536

Restart your computer to apply the settings. For more information see the DCE manual.

Downloading the project

Assuming the NS-3 DCE installation directory

export NS3_HOME="$HOME/dce"

cd $NS3_HOME/source/ns-3-dce
git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/jsjolund/D0020E-Simulations_Application_Transport.git
git fetch
git checkout -t origin/master

Running

./waf configure --with-ns3=$NS3_HOME/build --prefix=$NS3_HOME/build \
                --enable-kernel-stack=$NS3_HOME/source/net-next-sim-2.6.36/arch
./waf build
./waf --run my-simulator

Plotting

The plotting program is separate from the simulation. To plot the results from a simulation, run:

cd $NS3_HOME/source/ns-3-dce
build/myscripts/my-simulator/bin/./NSplot output.png my-simulator-output/*.dat -2d

Useful commands

Output from the DceApplicationHelper processes, i.e. the SCTP server and client programs, are stored in the folders $NS3_HOME/source/ns-3-dce/files-* where the star is the NS-3 NodeContainer id number.

To print what was written to standard output with e.g. printf("debug output") run

cd $NS3_HOME/source/ns-3-dce
find files-* -name 'stdout' -exec cat {} \;

Searching for all lines from standard output which contain the word "debug" can be done with

find files-* -name 'stdout' -exec grep 'debug' {} \;

Screenshots

The simulation interface is text based, but the program supports generation of NetAnim trace files in order to visualize node mobility. Below is a screenshot showing a network client sending data over a Wi-Fi network.