Installing NetSimulyzer 3D Visualization Tool on Debian 11

NetSimulyzer 3D Visualization Tool

In fact, ‘NetSimulyzer’ consists of two parts. One is the actual 3D visualization tool and the other is an ns-3 companion module.

Both are named as NetSimulyzer — so it will make some confusion during installation.

NetSimulyzer is a 3D visualizer tool that allows users to view the simulation results and network behavior in a Virtual, graphical 3D environment. It helps users understand the network performance and identify issues, such as congestion, delays, and packet loss, during the simulation. NetSimulyzer can be used to display the results of simulations in a variety of formats, including 3D nodes, node movements, graphs, charts, and tables, and can also be used to generate reports.

This article will only explain the installation of the ‘NetSimulyzer 3D visualization tool’.

This article is about compiling and installing NetSimulyzer 3D Visualization Tool under Debian 11 using cmake system.

NetSimulyzer 3D visualization tool able to ‘play’ the 3D network scenario from different camera perspectives using a special trace output file (.json format) which was created during the ns-3 simulation (the simulation which uses ns-3 NetSimulyzer module).

The NetSimulyzer 3D visualization tool can be used to play/animate/visualize ns-3 network scenarios for better understanding, presenting and debugging them.

Note: In the following article, I explained the installation of ‘NetSimulyzer ns-3 companion module’ under ns-3.37 [3] — which is used to generate 3D traces needed for recreating the 3D network scenarios.

Installing NetSimulyzer 3D Visualization Module with ns-3.37

The 3D Visualization Tool – Installation Requirements

(Preferably) a Debian/Ubuntu or any Linux variant.
A C++ 17 compliant compiler
Minimum supported compilers:
GCC 7.3.0
or Clang 6.0.0
CMake 3.13 or greater
A graphics card supporting OpenGL 3.3
Qt 5.12
Optional: Doxygen
And most preferably, a computer/laptop with a higher end CPU and GPU and with a LOT of memory. (Because compiling NetSimulyzer will consume a lot of CPU and memory resources and may just ‘hang’ or ‘crash’ your machine — particularly around at 85% of the ‘make’ process – So if your system is only having 8GB of memory, then better configure the swap partition or .swap file properly so that the ‘make’ process will logically end with NetSimulyzer binary)

Run Requirements

A graphics card supporting OpenGL 3.3
- Most integrated GPUs (i.e. Intel/AMD CPU Graphics) should work

Note: This part of the installation will not require a pre-installed ns-3.37 with the NetSimulyzer add-on module. (For demonstration purposes, we will only need a sample .json output from a previous 3D simulation[4])

The following screenshot shows the successful build process at the end of the compile. In fact, in this case, it is showing a warning message. We may simply ignore that warning.

Step 6: Run the NetSimulyzer.

$ cd ..

$ ./build/netsimulyzer

This will open the NetSimulyzer user interface from which you can load and play .jason format output 3D trace files.

Step 7: Visualizing a 3D Network Scenario

Load and visualize a 3D Network Scenario (that was previously created during a 3D ns-3 Simulation in [4])

In this example, the output file of the ns-3 example simulation ‘netsimulyzer-mobility-buildings-example.cc’ – ‘netsimulyzer-mobility-buildings-example.json’ has been loaded in the NetSimulyzer visualization tool. By clicking Node 0, we can ‘look’ the scenario from that node’s camera perspective.