A flexible 3D visualizer for displaying, debugging, presenting, and understanding ns-3 scenarios.
This is the application which displays ns-3 scenarios run with the companion ns-3 module found here.
Download prebuilt binaries from the Releases tab on GitHub.
Pre-run examples from the ns-3
module may be found in the examples/
directory of the Windows release on the
Releases page.
For other platforms, the examples are provided in a separate ZIP/TAR files also included on the Releases page.
The application comes with some 3D models, but if you wish to add custom models, check below to see what formats are supported.
For the list of supported formats, see the assimp wiki
Anything supported by QImage should work. Some more exotic formats may undergo conversion at load time. Build in debug mode to check compatibility
When the NetSimulyzer is first launched it will attempt to locate
the directory where all the bundled assets are located, the resources/
directory.
By default, the NetSimulyzer will search from the resources/
directory the following locations:
If the NetSimulyzer fails to locate this directory, a prompt will be given, and the user must specify where this directory is.
Models should have the path to the model relative to the root of the resources directory
(e.g. models/smartphone.obj
)
Textures will be searched for recursively in the resources/
directory, and must have unique names.
If two textures have the same name, it is undefined which one will be selected.
All searches for textures in models will follow the texture rules above.
The camera may be rotated by clicking and holding the left mouse button on the scene.
The camera may be moved by horizontally with W
, A
, S
, & D
,
vertically with Z
, & X
and turned with the Q
, & E
keys
W
: Forward
A
: Left
S
: Backward
D
: Right
Q
: Turn Left
E
: Turn Right
Z
: Up
X
: Down
The camera controls may be changed from the 'Camera Settings' option in the 'Camera' menu
The simulation starts in a paused state, the scene will still render, but time will not advance until it is unpaused.
P
: Pause/Resume scenario playback.
Left Mouse
+ Move: Move the chart view
Scroll Up, +
or =
: Zoom In
Ctrl
(Windows/Linux) or cmd
(macOS) to zoom horizontally onlyAlt
to zoom vertically onlyScroll Down, or -
: Zoom Out
Ctrl
(Windows/Linux) or cmd
(macOS) to zoom horizontally onlyAlt
to zoom vertically onlyR
: Reset Zoom
Arrow Keys
: Scroll Chart
Currently, these keys cannot be configured.
If you are not building for Linux, then skip this section.
Make sure cmake and Qt are available on your system. The following are the suggested packages for those requirements:
Ubuntu:
build-essential cmake pkg-config qtbase5-dev libassimp-dev
build-essential cmake pkg-config qt5-default libassimp-dev
Arch: base-devel cmake pkgconf qt5-base assimp
If you are not building for macOS (or a distro that uses Homebrew) then skip this section
The following Homebrew items are required to build/run the NetSimulyzer:
qt@5
cmake
They may be installed with the following command:
brew install qt@5 cmake
Clone the repository recursively to collect the dependencies as well as the source
# Use one of the below commands
# HTTPS (if unsure, use this one)
git clone --recursive https://github.com/usnistgov/NetSimulyzer.git
# SSH
git clone --recursive git@github.com:usnistgov/NetSimulyzer.git
Note: If you already cloned the project the normal way You may pull the dependencies by running
git submodule update --recursive
Move into the project's root directory, and make a new directory called build
and cd into it
mkdir build
cd build
To configure the build, any of the below may be passed to CMake with -D
in the form cmake -DNAME=VALUE
.
All of the following are optional
ENABLE_DOXYGEN
: Default False
, set to True
to build the API docs to the doxygen/
directory in the build directoryUSE_BUNDLED_ASSIMP
: Default False
, set to True
to use the bundled Assimp library to build, instead of the OS package.
If the OS package is not found, then the bundled version is used anyway.Run cmake
and specify the source directory, build type, and desired build options from above. Then run the build tool.
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . --parallel
When using Homebrew, it may be necessary
to specify the location of Qt
using the Qt5_DIR
variable.
Otherwise, the command to configure is identical to the Windows/Linux
build
cmake -DQt5_DIR=$(brew --prefix qt5)/lib/cmake/Qt5 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . --parallel
After building the application may be launched from the project root directory with the following command:
cd ../
./build/netsimulyzer
Sphinx is required to build the documentation.
To run Sphinx to build the documentation, cd into the docs
directory
and run make [type]
for the type of documentation you wish to build.
# From the project root directory
cd docs
# HTML (Several Pages)
make html
# HTML (One Page)
make singlehtml
# PDF
make latexpdf
# To list other options, just run make
make
The built documentation will now be found in doc/build/[type]
.
If you use it for research, please include the following reference in any resulting publication.
@inproceedings{blackNetSimulyzer3DNetwork2021,
title = {{{NetSimulyzer}}: A {{3D}} Network Simulation Analyzer for Ns-3},
shorttitle = {{{NetSimulyzer}}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {{Workshop}} on Ns-3},
author = {Black, Evan and Gamboa, Samantha and Rouil, Richard},
date = {2021-06-23},
pages = {65--72},
publisher = {{ACM}},
location = {{Virtual Event USA}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460797.3460806},
eventtitle = {{{WNS3}} 2021: 2021 {{Workshop}} on Ns-3},
isbn = {978-1-4503-9034-7},
langid = {english}
}