Towards an Efficient Protocol Development Process in the ShoX Network Simulator

Although network simulators present an effective means for the evaluation of communication protocols, there are still several unresolved challenges. To address them, in this paper, we provide an overview of different tools devised by us that aim to improve the efficiency of the protocol development and evaluation process in the ShoX network simulator. The presented tools include a (a) novel multi-view visualization that combines an enriched text view with a 2-D bird's eye and a graph view, enabling the analysis of communication patterns; (b) a protocol-state visualization allowing a flexible mapping between state and representation; (c) a simulation execution environment offering a user-friendly GUI enabling the distribution of large amounts of simulation runs; and (d) a statistics generation component, which provides a straightforward means to create statistics charts. The discussed tools were implemented, evaluated, and are available as open source within the ShoX network simulator project.