I have been thinking about a network simulation control GUI for a while. I think it would be interesting to have a command and conquer style interface for people to use to control the experiment - either in real time, or to ‘script’ the simulation run. There is an open-source variant of CnC called Boson, which we might look at to try and leverage this sort of interface. We would need to understand if this interface would be able to offer us anything, and how we would be able to control different aspects of the simulation environment. Another idea might be to combine this “view” of the world, with a FPS type interface. It should be possible (technically if not politically) to leverage the work being done in the BLaDE lab for much of this GUI stuff. These GUI’s could still be interfaced onto an ns-2 simulation environment, for offline simulation running. However, if we modified the core engine of ns-2 we might be able to get it to run as a “real-time” simulation environment, taking it’s cues from the external GUI environment. We might even look at jumping straight to ns-3, and thus helping to drive the development and adoption of this updated network simulator.

I think this would be an interesting idea to persue for a number of reasons:

• There is a lot of modelling and simulation work currently being done within the company, not just within my department. At the moment they are using Artemis, which is a business process modeling tool (as far as I know). Wouldn’t they gain more information by using a “proper” network modeling tool?

• This tool could be used for the Hyperion project work. It might be something that something that shows that we are a company worth working with.

• It would possibly allow us to give models of the network to non-technical staff, who could create realistic scenarios and have the system indicate how it might perform.

Some other things?