An open-source, platform-agnostic co-simulation tool for an increasingly connected world.
Overview
NSB – or Network Simulation Bridge – is an open-source tool that allows researchers, developers, and students to easily connect a front-end program to a back-end network simulator. NSB consists of a core service for message management and front-end and back-end APIs to connect to the core service and provide high-level interfaces for user implementation. NSB was always designed to be open-source and agnostic to the user’s choice of front-end interface, backend network simulator, and development environments (whether local or distributed). While NSB has already been published at MSWIM and used in our own research in AVs and decentralized IoT intelligence, our long-term vision is for it to serve users beyond the networking domain and make interactive network testing more accessible to the increasing number of related domains that are becoming more reliant on networks and distribution. NSB’s current development focuses on support for popular network simulators, standardizing the tech stack and optimizing performance, and creating APIs and resources for both domain experts and non-experts alike.
NSB has so far been developed fully in-house by i-NRG graduate and undergraduate student researchers. However, since our goal is to provide network simulation support to everyone who needs it and to collaborate, the future of NSB is an open-source ecosystem. i-NRG has partnered with UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office to develop such an ecosystem, from applying to funding programs to reaching out to new user communities.
Ongoing Work
What we’re working on now:
- Development of protocols for messages and communication between core service and interfaces.
- Optimized integration with popular network simulators, including OMNeT++ and ns-3.
- Addition of wanted features, including feature synchronization and real-time analysis support.
If you’re interested in working with us, contact any of the active Ph.D. students below. Experience with Python and C++ development would be greatly appreciated and experience with network simulators would be a plus!
Publications
Harikrishna S. Kuttivelil, Shesha Sreenivasamurthy, Lakshmi Krishnaswamy, Nayan Bhatia, and Katia Obraczka. 2023. Network Simulation Bridge: Bridging Applications to Network Simulators. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Symposium on QoS and Security for Wireless and Mobile Networks (Q2SWinet ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 39–46. https://doi.org/10.1145/3616391.3622771
People
Ph.D. Students
Nayan Bhatia – project lead
Harikrishna Kuttivelil – co-creator, project lead
Lakshmi Krishnaswamy – project lead
Shesha Sreenivasamurthy (inactive) – co-creator
Undergraduate Students
Currently: Maggie Cai, Jasmeen Kaur, Psi Padhya, Alex Woelkers
Formerly: Sarah Chun, Brian Huang