A 2k · r factorial analysis tool for ns2measure

In recent years simulation has been the most used tool for performance analysis of communication networks, due to the ever increasing complexity of modern architectures and technologies. There are two correlated problems that are typically encountered when using simulation, especially by less experienced practitioners. Often, the number of factors that affect the response of such systems is high, which makes it difficult to distinguish their relative impact on the performance. Secondly, it would be helpful to know which are the most important factors before running the actual simulation campaign, so as to reduce the number of scenarios, hence the overall computational time, which otherwise can grow unnecessarily large. Both these problems are alleviated substantially if well-established methodologies, e.g. the 2k × r factorial analysis, are employed. In this work we present a new tool that implement all the procedures for running a 2k × r factorial analysis in a simple and sound manner. The tool, called factorial2kr, has been developed within the ns2measure framework, which is an integrated module, in a mature state of development, for collecting and analyzing statistical data with the widely used network simulator ns-2. The software is released under GPL.