🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello !

I hope I have used the correct group, if not please mail me where it should have
been.

Anyway, this is my situation:

I'm a 4th year student at Comp. Sci. Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh. This is my last
year and during the year I have a dissertation. The dissertation is as follows:

: Computer Network Visualisation
:
: The design of computer network management protocols is difficult.  If
: routing and congestion control policies can be visualised, then feedback
: may enable human intuituion to develop better algorithms.
:
: This project would involve writing a system which could set up a
: computer network model, display it visually, and allow simulated traffic
: to pass over it.  Users would have the opportunity to replace various
: protocols within the network, and specify network delays, error rates
: etc.  The performance of individual computers and links in the network
: would be visually displayed.

The program shall simulate the network layer in the OSI model.
The basic version of the program shall allow the user to specify a network with
a number of nodes, and specify the amount of traffic from the different nodes.
The description of the network is read from a textfile with a special layout.

The program shall use XWindows on a Sun Sparc station, and I'm will use C/C++.
I am now trying to describe the functions of the program. So far I have found
the following functions:
	- Load/Save network definition
	- Insert/Delete node in network
	- Change traffic from a node
	- Set delay in node/link
	- Set throughput of link
	- Set probabilities of a node/link going down
 
So I'm looking for some input from more experienced network users/programmers
to point-out some more functions. I am also looking for some algorithms to 
display the network. Finally I would like to find the best way of representing
the nodes. Should I have only one process which control all the nodes, or
hould I maybe have several processes which control a node and use some kind of 
inter-process communication to simulate the traffic.

If you got some ideas, please mail me.

Jan Friborg

| EMail : janf@cs.hw.ac.uk