A Visualization and Animation Tool for NS-2 Wireless Simulations: iNSpect

The Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) is a popular and powerful simulation environment, and the number of NS-2 users has increased greatly in recent years. Although it was originally designed for wired networks, NS-2 has been extended to work with wireless networks, including wireless LANs, mobile ad hoc networks, and sensor networks. The Network Animator (NAM) for NS-2 has not been extended for wireless visualization, however. In this paper, we discuss a new visualization and animation tool for use with NS-2 wireless simulations. Visual analysis of a wireless environment is important for three areas of NS-2 based simulation research: (1) validating the accuracy of a mobility model’s output and/or the node topology files used to drive the simulation; (2) validation of new versions of the NS-2 simulator itself; and (3) analysis of the resulting NS-2 trace files. Our iNSpect program can handle all three of these areas quickly and accurately. We’ve made our iNSpect program available for other researchers in order to improve the accuracy of their simulations. See http://toilers.mines.edu for information on obtaining iNSpect.