ns-3

What do you like best?

For start-up learner, it can be a little playground where your can set up your own network scenario and topology, like how many nodes you want to put there as well as the distances between them, what layers they are working on and customize parameters like their transfer rate and delay etc to schedule events...by digging into the logs after experiment, you can have an overall sight on what is going on in that network layout. Great way to get in touch with those popular devices and protocols in a simulated environment.

For experienced engineer or developers, ns-3 is a comprehensive and powerful platform to choose when you want to implement or realize your theory and design. For example, if you want to implement a new protocol and see how it work in practical use, you can either edict existing protocols or rewrite a new protocol suite, then make it compatible with others and embed them into devices which refers to object "node" in ns-3...great platform for computer network research!

What do you dislike?

The most annoying part of this software use may be the installation. As a rookie, when I built the ns-3 in my Ubuntu Linux environment, I went through all the steps on the tutorial and it turned out that almost every version of this software have more or less incompatibility with my operating system or components of it, some doesn't matter but some are vital, so I did spent a bunch of time configuring it. I hope the developer team would make those guide more specific and focus more on troubleshooting.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Great playground and research platform for computer network learner, learn some Unix operation before using this software

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I built a cognitive wireless module in ns-3, with new spectrum sensing strategy and frequency hand-off decision making.

The greatest benefit is ns-3 enable users to learn, edit and design all those protocols deep insides and from high view make events animation.