SoC Gossip

After all the trouble I had with ns-2, I’ve gotten round to reading my first paper. It was an interesting read, but I felt it was a bit thin on content. I’ve gotten used to the idea that academic papers tend to be on the dry side, but all the advice I’ve had thus far is to persevere. So it was with a certain relief that I found a paper that was easy to read!  A summary of what the contents along with a brief critique is below.  One down, eight to go!

Clincy, V. A. and Mudiraj, P. 2006. The future leading mobility protocol: mobile IPv4 OR Mobile IPv6?. J. Comput. Small Coll. 22, 1 (Oct. 2006), 197-203.

The paper looked to evaluate both MIPv4 and MIPv6 so as to give an opinion as to which protocol would be the ‘Future Leading’. What the article failed to comment on was the fact that the world is fast running out of IPv4 addresses which may have an impact on its suitability as a ‘Future Leading’ protocol.

The paper gave a brief overview of the key differences between the two protocols:

• MIPv4 requires the use of a Foreign Agent
• MIPv6 uses Route Optimization (sic) for improved performance
• MIPv4 uses ARP
• MIPv6 uses Neighbour Discovery
• MIPv4 uses a directed broadcast approach to discover the Home Agent
• MIPv6 uses anycast and receives a single reply

The paper mentioned that one of the key aspects of performance is in the handover from one access point to the next whilst a mobile node is moving. The details of this differ from MIPv4 to MIPv6. It is worth mentioning that IPv6 has had Mobility in mind since inception.

My chief criticism with this paper is that the comparison experiments were limited to two scenarios but neither used both protocols for a fair test. As mentioned before, both IPv4 and IPv6 implement Mobile IP differently. The scenarios were:

• Wired Mobile IP network using Mobile IPv4
• Wireless Mobile IP network using Mobile IPv6

Surely it would have made sense to at least run MIPv4 and MIPv6 across a wired and wireless Mobile IP network?  Also the chosen metric to assess the performance was the end-to-end delays.  No explanation was given which would have been insightful.

Finally there was some data supplied which suggested that MIPv6 is more efficient at routing information as a result of there being no foreign agent and the Route Optimisation strategy.

So in summary, I didn’t learn much more than I’d already found out from books and in the end, the paper didn’t commit to what the authors felt was a ‘Future Leading’ protocol.

I’m still experiencing setbacks with relation to the installation of ns-2 and also the Mobiwan extensions for Mobile IPv6.

Here’s the current situation:

• I’ve been unable to install the following on my Laptop under Ubuntu:
  • ns-2.26
  • ns-2.27
  • Mobiwan extension for Mobile IPv6 for ns-2.31
• I’ve been unable to install the following under Windows (with Cygwin)
  • ns-2.26
  • ns-2.27

The only option left to me, short of suggesting an alternative simulator, is to ask Support to install ns with the Mobile IPv6 extension on my behalf. This isn’t an ideal situation as I’d prefer to be able to use my own machine and not rely on the SoC computer provision.

So, not much forward movement at the moment, but at least it still (relatively) early days.

For my final year project, I am going to use a network simulator simply called ‘ns’. In order to simulate Mobile IPv6, I need to install the Mobiwan extension that has been written for ns by Thierry Ernst.

Unfortunately, it was last updated in December 2004 and only works on an older version of ns. (I’d already tried applying the extension to the latest version, ns-2.31 with no luck). This already had alarm bells ringing and so I set about installing the older, compatible version, ns2-27. However, there were some installation issues that as yet I am unable to resolve. I’m presently trying to run ns under Cygwin on Windows, but I’m not entirely confident that this will work either.

This leaves me with a few choices:

1. I persevere and install ns.
2. I use an alternative network simulator.
3. I change the scope of the project.

Given where I am at in relation to the project, option 3 is out, and I’ll need to consult my Supervisor over option 2 so for initial time being, i might as well continue with option 1.

An update to this will (hopefully) appear later today.

I’ve managed to find nine seemingly relevant papers through the Web of Science, seven of which I’ve printed out. I’ll now spend the next few days reading them and trying to ascertain what it is they have and haven’t done, and what I could do different and/or better. This seems to be the challenge! I also need to get ns-2 installed on my home machine although with the latest release of Ubuntu 7.10, I’m worried about compatibility issues. I’m sure someone will be able to put my mind at ease on this one (paging Dr. O’Shea…).

Ant.

I have just been using the Web of Science database which can be found through the University’s library page, www.leeds.ac.uk/library, and thus far it’s turned up several papers relating to Mobile IPv6 and specifically simulation and performance. The next stage is to go through the papers and ascertain what useful nuggets of information I can find.

Karim, my supervisor, mentioned to me that I need to also find information regarding other simulators so as to justify the decision to use the ns-2 network simulator. This might prove to be more difficult as I can’t think where I would find the kind of information that would allow such comparisons. I guess a good starting point would be to do a search with Google for ‘network simulators’ and then visit the websites of the differing programs.

I may need to find better sources of information for my report however…

Ant.

Good afternoon! It’s a lovely Saturday afternoon in November and probably a little warmer than I would expect it to be!

Some of my friends are also doing final year projects and it had been suggested to them that they blog their experiences to keep a record of what goes on. With this in mind, I decided to do the same. It will hopefully prove useful not only when writing the personal reflections section of the report, but also give me an idea of what I was thinking about at a certain time. In other words, my memory is good, but not that good!

If you decide to follow my progress and wish to comment, please do so and hopefully it’ll help me in some way. I’ll also try and link to some blogs operated by others so you can see what they might be up to.

In the meantime, I hope you’re all having a good weekend thus far!

Ant.