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NetSimulyzer

A flexible 3D visualizer for displaying, debugging, presenting, and understanding ns-3 scenarios.

Application Screenshot

Table of Contents

About

This is the application which displays ns-3 scenarios run with the companion ns-3 module found here.

Requirements

Run Requirements

  • A graphics card supporting OpenGL 3.3
    • Most integrated GPUs (i.e. Intel/AMD CPU Graphics) should work too

Build Requirements

  • A C++ 17 compliant compiler
    • Minimum supported compilers:
      • GCC 10.5.0
      • Clang 12.0.0
  • CMake 3.13 or greater
  • A graphics card supporting OpenGL 3.3
  • Qt 5.12
  • Optional: Doxygen

Download Prebuilt Releases

Download prebuilt binaries from the Releases tab on GitHub.

Download Pre-Run Examples

Pre-run examples from the ns-3 module may be found in the examples/ directory of the Windows release on the Releases page.

For other platforms, the examples are provided in a separate ZIP/TAR files also included on the Releases page.

Resources

The application comes with some 3D models, but if you wish to add custom models, check below to see what formats are supported.

Supported Model Formats

For the list of supported formats, see the assimp wiki

Supported Texture Formats

Anything supported by QImage should work. Some more exotic formats may undergo conversion at load time. Build in debug mode to check compatibility

Resource Path

When the NetSimulyzer is first launched it will attempt to locate the directory where all the bundled assets are located, the resources/ directory.

By default, the NetSimulyzer will search from the resources/ directory the following locations:

  • The directory the application is in
  • One up from the directory the application is in
  • The current working directory
  • One up from the current working directory

If the NetSimulyzer fails to locate this directory, a prompt will be given, and the user must specify where this directory is.

Models should have the path to the model relative to the root of the resources directory (e.g. models/smartphone.obj)

Textures will be searched for recursively in the resources/ directory, and must have unique names. If two textures have the same name, it is undefined which one will be selected.

All searches for textures in models will follow the texture rules above.

Controls

Camera

The camera may be rotated by clicking and holding the left mouse button on the scene.

The camera may be moved by horizontally with W, A, S, & D, vertically with Z, & X and turned with the Q, & E keys

W: Forward

A: Left

S: Backward

D: Right

Q: Turn Left

E: Turn Right

Z: Up

X: Down

The camera controls may be changed from the 'Camera Settings' option in the 'Camera' menu

Playback

The simulation starts in a paused state, the scene will still render, but time will not advance until it is unpaused.

P: Pause/Resume scenario playback.

Chart

Left Mouse + Move: Move the chart view

Scroll Up, + or =: Zoom In

  • Hold Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or cmd (macOS) to zoom horizontally only
  • Hold Alt to zoom vertically only

Scroll Down, or -: Zoom Out

  • Hold Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or cmd (macOS) to zoom horizontally only
  • Hold Alt to zoom vertically only

R: Reset Zoom

Arrow Keys: Scroll Chart

Currently, these keys cannot be configured.

Building From Source

Linux Packages

If you are not building for Linux, then skip this section.

Make sure cmake and Qt are available on your system. The following are the suggested packages for those requirements:

Ubuntu:

  • (22.04) build-essential cmake pkg-config qtbase5-dev libassimp-dev
  • (20.04) build-essential cmake pkg-config qt5-default libassimp-dev

Arch: base-devel cmake pkgconf qt5-base assimp

macOS Homebrew Packages

If you are not building for macOS (or a distro that uses Homebrew) then skip this section

The following Homebrew items are required to build/run the NetSimulyzer:

  • qt@5
  • cmake

They may be installed with the following command:

brew install qt@5 cmake

Cloning

Clone the repository recursively to collect the dependencies as well as the source

# Use one of the below commands

# HTTPS (if unsure, use this one)
git clone --recursive https://github.com/usnistgov/NetSimulyzer.git

# SSH
git clone --recursive git@github.com:usnistgov/NetSimulyzer.git

Note: If you already cloned the project the normal way You may pull the dependencies by running

git submodule update --recursive

Building

Move into the project's root directory, and make a new directory called build and cd into it

mkdir build
cd build

CMake Options

To configure the build, any of the below may be passed to CMake with -D in the form cmake -DNAME=VALUE.

All of the following are optional

  • ENABLE_DOXYGEN: Default False, set to True to build the API docs to the doxygen/ directory in the build directory
  • USE_BUNDLED_ASSIMP: Default False, set to True to use the bundled Assimp library to build, instead of the OS package. If the OS package is not found, then the bundled version is used anyway.

Running CMake

Windows/Linux

Run cmake and specify the source directory, build type, and desired build options from above. Then run the build tool.

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . --parallel
macOS (Homebrew Install)

When using Homebrew, it may be necessary to specify the location of Qt using the Qt5_DIR variable. Otherwise, the command to configure is identical to the Windows/Linux build

cmake -DQt5_DIR=$(brew --prefix qt5)/lib/cmake/Qt5 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . --parallel

Running

After building the application may be launched from the project root directory with the following command:

cd ../
./build/netsimulyzer

Building the Documentation

Sphinx is required to build the documentation.

To run Sphinx to build the documentation, cd into the docs directory and run make [type] for the type of documentation you wish to build.

# From the project root directory
cd docs

# HTML (Several Pages)
make html

# HTML (One Page)
make singlehtml

# PDF
make latexpdf

# To list other options, just run make
make

The built documentation will now be found in doc/build/[type].

Academic Attribution

If you use it for research, please include the following reference in any resulting publication.

@inproceedings{blackNetSimulyzer3DNetwork2021,
  title = {{{NetSimulyzer}}: A {{3D}} Network Simulation Analyzer for Ns-3},
  shorttitle = {{{NetSimulyzer}}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {{Workshop}} on Ns-3},
  author = {Black, Evan and Gamboa, Samantha and Rouil, Richard},
  date = {2021-06-23},
  pages = {65--72},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  location = {{Virtual Event USA}},
  url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460797.3460806},
  eventtitle = {{{WNS3}} 2021: 2021 {{Workshop}} on Ns-3},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-9034-7},
  langid = {english}
}