Expanding the Ns-2 emulation environment with the use of flexible mapping

Abstract

The Berkeley’s ns-2 simulator was, for a long time, one of the most popular open-source simulation tools. Although the new tool in the ns family, the ns-3, replaced it in the above ranking, the simplicity of the ns-2, with its flexibility and ability to operate at higher levels of abstraction caused the simulator to remain in use. This paper presents our enhancements to the mapping of incoming and outgoing traffic in the ns-2 simulator when it works in emulation mode. Our enhancements expand the build-in 1-to-1 MAC address mapping to 1-to-many address/port mapping, which allows the emulator to connect to more end-systems or subnetworks than the number of interfaces of the emulation server.