1st International ICST Workshop on ns-2: The IP Network Simulator

Research Article

An integrated framework for enabling effective data collection and statistical analysis with ns-2

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/1190455.1190466,
        author={Claudio  Cicconetti and Enzo  Mingozzi and Giovanni  Stea},
        title={An integrated framework for enabling effective data collection and statistical analysis with ns-2},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Workshop on ns-2: The IP Network Simulator},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={WNS2},
        year={2012},
        month={4},
        keywords={Simulation ns-2 statistical analysis},
        doi={10.1145/1190455.1190466}
    }
    
  • Claudio Cicconetti
    Enzo Mingozzi
    Giovanni Stea
    Year: 2012
    An integrated framework for enabling effective data collection and statistical analysis with ns-2
    WNS2
    ACM
    DOI: 10.1145/1190455.1190466
Claudio Cicconetti1,*, Enzo Mingozzi1,*, Giovanni Stea1,*
  • 1: Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Pisa, Via Diotisalvi, 2 – 56100 Pisa, ITALY.
*Contact email: c.cicconetti@iet.unipi.it, e.mingozzi@iet.unipi.it, g.stea@iet.unipi.it

Abstract

The Network Simulator 2 (ns-2) is an open source tool for network simulation. When planning for large-scale simulation experiments, an efficient and flexible data collection and a statistically sound output data analysis are important aspects to keep in mind. Unfortunately, ns-2 offers little support for data collection, and statistical analysis of the simulation results is most often performed offline, using either home made code or available packages, which are not integrated with ns-2. In this paper we describe two complementary contributions: the first one consists of a set of C++ modules, that allow a flexible and efficient data collection; the second one is a software framework, which is fully integrated with ns-2, that performs all the operations required to carry out simulation experiments in a statistically sound way. Our framework allows a user to significantly reduce the postprocessing overhead and to save simulation time, especially with large-scale simulations. Our code is publicly available at [3].