Policy-based Resilience Simulator with OMNeT++/Introduction

Instructions on how to set up a Policy-based Resilience Simulator is given in Lancaster Network Resilience website, and it misses few finer details which makes one often hit a dead end.

The author of the original article in Lancaster Network Resilience website had MacOS X in mind when he wrote it, but this article describes how to compile it in GNU/Linux. The reason for choosing GNU/Linux is simple:

  • In Windows and OSX most of the dependencies will have to be compiled from the source, whereas in GNU/Linux, it all can be done in few clicks or just one line in Terminal.
  • You can make GNU/Linux "more" lightweight (low on resources), than OSX and Windows. OMNeT++ is heavy and eats up a lot of memory, and if your system is weak, this is the only way out for you.
  • GNU/Linux can be installed in both PCs and MacBooks.

If you are very particular about OS X, you can follow the original guide, or for Windows, everything works near same than for XML-RPC compilation, I guess. In case of Windows, you are on your own.

Please use a 32-bit version of some popular Linux Distributions like Linux Mint or Xubuntu (XFCE because it is light weight - OMNeT++ is really heavy on machine) since one of the components, Distack fails to compile in 64-bit. For the purpose of writing this article, the procedure was successfully tried in Xubuntu 12.04, 13.04 and Linux Mint 14 (Mate) 32-bit.

If you follow the Lancaster Resilience Network website guide, you may get few errors while building ReaSE. The reason is, ReaSE will compile only with INET 20100723 or earlier and that version of INET is particular about OMNeT++ 4.1. Such finer details are noted in this guide, so even if you are following the original article, it is recommended that you to read through this once.

Overall Picture edit

We'll be setting up Policy-based Resilience Simulator with OMNeT++, an open source network simulator. During the process we'll be building few packages called INET framework,ReaSE,Distack and Ponder 2.

The articles are structured in such a way that, all articles are independent of each other unless mentioned. That is, to build OMNeT++ alone, you can follow this article and for INET, read only up to this one.

Footnotes edit

This article was originally written in 2013, but since ReaSE was not updated since then, I guess it is still valid. Since I am not an expert in OMNeT++, and have forgotten the bits I've learned already, please do correct if there are any mistakes.

Source Link List edit

Basics