FlowMonitor: a network monitoring framework for the network simulator 3 (NS-3)

When networking researchers meet the task of doing simulations, there is always a need to evaluate the value of such models by measuring a set of well known network performance metrics. However, simulators in general and NS-3 in particular, require significant programming effort from the researcher in order to collect those metrics. This paper reports a contribution for NS-3 consisting of a new flow monitoring module that makes it easier to collect and save to persistent storage a common set of network performance metrics. The module automatically detects all flows passing through the network and stores in a file most of the metrics that a researcher might need to analyze about the flow, such as bitrates, duration, delays, packet sizes, and packet loss ratio. The value of this module is demonstrated using an easy to follow example. It is also validated by comparing the measurements of a simple scenario with the expected values. Finally, the performance of flow monitoring is characterized and shown to introduce small overheads.