Hardware
There are some hardware experiments running in the laboratory by master students, to test the performance of any network, wireless or wired. Some of those experiments are:
- Four 3Com Ethernet client bridges
- Three Cisco access points
- Four 3Com firewalls
- Three 3Com 24 port switch
- Two Allied Telesis 12 port switch
- One 3Com 8 port switch
- One Intel 16 port switch
- Three Net-gear access points
- Fourteen PCI MCI wireless cards
- Three Ericsson Bluetooth devices
- Four power full Antennas
Software
FEKO Software
FEKO is a comprehensive electromagnetic simulation software tool, based on state of the art computational electromagnetics (CEM) techniques. It enables users to solve a wide range of electromagnetic problems. The multiple solution techniques available within FEKO make it applicable to a wide range of problems for a large array of industries. Typical applications include:
- Antennas: analysis of horns, microstrip patches, wire antennas, reflector antennas, conformal antennas, broadband antennas, arrays
- Antenna placement: analysis of antenna radiation patterns, radiation hazard zones, etc. with an antenna placed on a large structure, e.g. ship, aircraft, armoured car
- EMC: analysis of diverse EMC problems including shielding effectiveness of an enclosure, cable coupling analysis in complex environments, e.g. wiring in a car, radiation hazard analysis
- Bio-electromagnetics: analysis of homogeneous or non-homogeneous bodies, SAR extraction
- RF components: analysis of waveguide structures, e.g. filter, slotted antennas, directional couplers
- 3D EM circuits: analysis of microstrip filters, couplers, inductors, etc.
- Radomes: analysis of multiple dielectric layers in a large structure
- Scattering problems: RCS analysis of large and small structures
For more information on FEKO go to the http://www.feko.info/home page
TinyOS software
TinyOS is an open source, BSD-licensed operating system designed for low-power wireless devices, such as those used in sensor networks, ubiquitious computing, personal area networks, smart buildings, and smart meters. A worldwide community from academia and industry use, develop, and support the operating system as well as its associated tools, averaging 35,000 downloads a year.
For more information on FEKO go to the http://www.tinyos.net/ home page
SIM+
SIM+ is a slotted time simulator, based on the fixed-length packet simulator SIM developed by the High Performance Networking Group.The simulator is written in ANSI C.
It can be used to evaluate the performance of a variety of switching architectures using different queueing, scheduling or transmission schemes, as specified by the user. SIM+ improves upon SIM by providing users a provision to specify flow level parameters. Flow level parameters help the user to control the individual QOS of each flow. SIM+ has augmented the statistics with per- flow information, thus helping the user to determine the QOS guarantees.
SIM+2.02 is available for download.
SIM++3.1 is available for download.
For more information on SIM go to the SIM home page
OPNET
OPNET is the industry’s leading network development software. OPNET allows you to design and study communication networks,devices, protocols, and application. It is used by the world’s most prestigious technology organizations to accelerate the R&D process.
Opnet’s object-oriented modeling approach and graphical user interface(GUI) enable relatively easy means of developing models from the actual world network, hardware devices, and protocols.OPNET supports all major network types and technologies, allowing you to design and test various scenarios with reasonable certainty of the output results.
The application areas include:
- Network planning (both LAN and/or WAN) and analysis of performance and problems prior to actual implementation
- Wireless and Satellite communication schemes and protocols
- Microwave and Fiber-optic based Network Management
- Protocol Development and management
- Routing algorithm evaluation for routers, switches, and other connecting devices.
At NRL , we currently use OPNET for teaching and research purposes. Research activities in the area of end system multicasting have been carried out using OPNET’s multicast module. Peformance analysis of End System Multicast models have been efficiently carried out.
For more information on OPNET go to the OPNET home page
QUALNET
QualNet is the next generation of the scalable GlMoSim (Global Mobile Information Systems Simulator) simulator. Glomosim was designed to simulate large-scale wireless networks with thousands of mobile nodes, each of which may different communication capabilities via multi-hop ground,aircraft and satellite media. QualNet has extended GloMoSim’s capabilities to wired networks as well as mixed wired and wireless networks. QualNet uses the parallel simulation kernel provided by the PARSEC discrete-event simulation language. Thus Qualnet is among the few simulators for wireless and wired networks that been implemented on sequential and parallel architectures.
At NRL , we currently useQualNet for teaching and research purposes. Research activities in the area of mixed-mode simulations are carried out in QualNet
For more information on QualNet go to the QualNet home page