[ns] NS & NAM Difficulty in Visualaztion of Greis' Wireless Examples

[Raju Mansukhlal Shah <rshah@seas.gwu.edu>]

Hello,

I am working on a wireless project with a few others, and we are in the
process of thoroughly understanding Greis' examples and have run into a
few snags.

I am working on a Windows NT platform and I am using NS 2.1b7 and NAM
1.0a9.

My teammember is working on a Sun Solaris 5.6 using NS 2.1b6 and NAM
1.0a8.

He is also working on a Red Hat (Wolverine - 7.09) Linux using NS 2.1b7a
and NAM 1.0a9.


My *.nam is

W -t * -x 670 -y 670
n -t * -s 0  -x 83.364418416244007 -y 239.43800983126101 -Z 0 -z 20  -v circle -c black
n -t * -s 1  -x 257.04629832315698 -y 345.35773177920402 -Z 0 -z 20  -v circle -c black
n -t * -s 2  -x 591.25656009383295 -y 199.37330681680399 -Z 0 -z 20  -v circle -c black
V -t * -v 1.0a5 -a 0
A -t * -n 1 -p 0 -o 0xffffffff -c 31 -a 1
A -t * -h 1 -m 2147483647 -s 0
n -t 33.000000 -s 0 -x 83.364418 -y 239.438010 -u 2.711074 -v 18.960996 -T 2.323540
n -t 50.000000 -s 2 -x 591.256560 -y 199.373307 -u -3.343610 -v -0.434985 -T 66.333489
n -t 51.000000 -s 1 -x 257.046298 -y 345.357732 -u -1.967869 -v -14.778819 -T 17.897386
+ -t 127.936679222 -s 0 -d -1 -p cbr -e 512 -c 2 -a 0 -i 0 -k AGT

My teammember's *.nam from his Sun Solaris 5.6 is

W -t * -x 670 -y 670
n -t * -s 0  -x 83.364418416244007 -y 239.43800983126101 -Z 0 -z 20  -v circle -c black
n -t * -s 1  -x 257.04629832315698 -y 345.35773177920402 -Z 0 -z 20  -v circle -c black
n -t * -s 2  -x 591.25656009383295 -y 199.37330681680399 -Z 0 -z 20  -v circle -c black
V -t * -v 1.0a5 -a 0
A -t * -n 1 -p 0 -o 0xffffffff -c 31 -a 1
A -t * -h 1 -m 2147483647 -s 0
n -t 33.000000 -s 0 -x 83.364418 -y 239.438010 -u 2.711074 -v 18.960996 -T 0.046550
n -t 50.000000 -s 2 -x 591.256560 -y 199.373307 -u -3.343610 -v -0.434985 -T 66.333489
n -t 51.000000 -s 1 -x 257.046298 -y 345.357732 -u -1.967869 -v -14.778819 -T 0.311796
+ -t 127.936679222 -s 0 -d -1 -p cbr -e 512 -c 2 -a 0 -i 0 -k AGT

The start of his *.nam from the Laptop is identical to mine (we didn't
compare the rest of the files)

Using a back of the envelope approach the numbers from my simulation seem
correct.  Thus, this seems to be an undocumented problem with NS version
2.1b6, in that the time duration that a node is in transit is incorrect.

However, when trying to visualize the nam file we noticed some
irregularites.  When we ran my nam file with NAM v1.0a8, we would see
circles raidate from nodes, representing packets.  Running the same nam
file with NAM v1.0a9, we don't see any packets transmitted.

When we ran his nam file produced from NS 2.1b6, the packets were
transmitted as though there were hard wire links between the nodes.  When
we ran his laptop output we again so nothing being transmitted between
nodes.

While it seems that the Time duration of travel has been fixed from NS
2.1b6 to 2.1b7, the Visualization aspect of packet flow has been dropped
from NAM 1.0a8 to 1.0a9.  Will this feature be returning in the next
installment of NAM or is there a fix that we can do ourselves?

Thanks

raju