Fast ns-2 simulator

The fast ns-2 simulator is the modification of a popular network simulator (ns-2). Fast ns-2 is developed at the Laboratory for Software Technologies at ETH Zürich to enable simulation of large scale ad hoc wireless networks.

Description

An ad hoc network is formed by wireless mobile nodes (hosts) that operate as terminals as well as routers in the network, without any centralized administration. Research in ad hoc networks often involves simulators since management and operation of a large number of nodes is expensive. However, the widely used simulator ns-2 does not scale; it is very hard to simulate medium scale networks with 100+ nodes.

We have modified ns-2 to meet the needs of large ad hoc network simulations. The modified ns-2 simulator is based on the idea of exploiting the limited interference of wireless communication. The modified simulator has simulated populations of up to 3000 nodes so far and works up to 30 times faster than the original version.

Install & configure
IMPORTANT: The last ns-2 release (ns-2.27) does include our changes!
To download the last ns-2 release visit : www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns
If you have an older ns-2 version already installed, you can still download our patch from this site.

Requirements

To be able to use fast ns-2 you will need:

• A machine with an installation of the standard ns-2 simulator (versions 2.1b6a, 2.1b7a, 2.1b9a-gcc32 or 2.26).
  To download and install standard simulator please visit the ns-2 home page.
• Any C/C++ compiler (as GCC)

Installation procedure

To install fast ns-2 you must have a write access to the directory with the standard ns-2 installation.

• Download the fast-ns2 package
• Extract the fast-ns2 source tree into some temporary location
• Run the configure script to set up fast-ns2 for your configuration .

Documentation

• Valeri Naoumov, Thomas Gross, Simulation of Large Ad Hoc Networks,
  In Proceedings of The Sixth ACM International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (in conjunction with ACM MobiCOM 2003), September 2003, San Diego, CA, USA
  ACM, 2003. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the Proceedings of MSWiM (September 2003) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/940991.941001

Usage

ns your-wireless-sim.tcl -tr your-trace-file.tr >> your-trace-file.tr
You must redirect the output into the same trace file as specified in your tcl script.
That is the only difference in the usage, the rest is the same as for standard ns-2 (see "The ns Manual").

Contact

NO SUPPORT. Questions questions, like:

• Starting from which number of nodes fast ns-2 outperforms the standard system?
• Why I don't see any difference with 50 nodes?
• How to use?
• Etc.

are addressed in the paper above. Read it first.
In case of problems please check ns-2 bug reports and FAQ at www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns

Valeri Naoumov <naoumov**at**inf.ethz.ch>
(Please substitute "**at**" with "@")