[Ns-developers] Visualization library

[Jeremy]

In response to your discussion and on behalf of the Toilers Research
Group, I would like to fill everyone in on our efforts to date at
developing an ns-3 visualization tool.

Many of you may have already heard of iNSpect, but for those of you
who haven't, it is an ns-2 visualization tool that is used by over
420 researchers in 51 countries (as of December 2007) for visualizing
mobile ad-hoc and/or wireless networks (MANets). The current version
of iNSpect is version 3.5. The original version of iNSpect was
developed by Tracy Camp, Stuart Kurkowski, Mike Colagrosso, Neil
(Tuli) Mushell,  Matthew Gimlin, Neal Erickson, and Jeff Boleng from
the Toilers Research Group at the Colorado School of Mines. In April
2005, Fatih Gey and Peter Eginger from the Department Security
Technology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research
over-hauled the iNSpect (version 3.3) visualization tool for wireless
networks. This overhaul provided a cleaner and more logical class
structure, allowing it to be much easier to extend this visualization
tool. In November 2007, the Toilers decided to update iNSpect to
handle both wired and wireless visualization and to work in ns-3. Our
hope is that the new iNSpect visualizer (for wired and wireless
simulations) will be included with future ns-3 distributions.
Our current team consists of Jeremy Norman, Chris Walsh, Kurt
Strovink, and Tracy Camp from the Toilers Research Group at the
Colorado School of Mines. We are extending the Fraunhofer IGD
implementation of iNSpect by adding simulation support for wired
networks (dubbed version 4). So far we have redesigned the internal
model to handle wired and wireless simulations, and we have added the
ability to turn nodes on and off during the simulation (e.g., to
handle limited energy models). Our update to iNSpect is still able to
handle the ns-2 new-trace format for wireless, but can now also
handle ns-2 wired traces. Currently, we are adding parsers for the
PCAP trace format and plan to start more in-depth ns-3 wired/wireless
parsing soon. Most of our current focus has been on finishing the
visualization updates necessary for wired traces and updating the
wireless visualization to a new format. We hope to have the
visualization portion done within the next couple weeks.

Just as a note for completeness, iNSpect version 4 currently relies
on g++ 4.1.2 and 4.2.1, gtkglext 1.2.0 (distributed with iNSpect),
and OpenGL 2.0. Previous versions were tested on cygwin, redhat, and
Windows XP SP2 (Using Dev C++). We plan to keep the new version of
iNSpect at least as portable as the previous versions.

Finally, I would like to extend a warm welcome to any suggestions or
help that we can get from the ns-3 development community to make this
update. If you would like to assist in this effort, please contact me
at jnorman at mines.edu (or respond to this message).

Sincerely,

Jeremy Norman, the iNSpect team, and the Toilers Research Group.