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Network Analysis and Routing eVALuation

Foued Melakessou, University of Luxembourg

Network Analysis and Routing eVALuation, referenced as NARVAL has been designed on top of the Scilab environment. It has been created at the University of Luxembourg within the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT). The Centre carries out interdisciplinary research and graduate education in secure, reliable, and trustworthy ICT systems and services.

This Scilab External Module (http://atoms.scilab.org/toolboxes/NARVAL) is focusing on the analysis of network protocols and algorithms. In fact, each network of communicating devices such as computers, phones or sensors, needs to follows specific rules in order to organize and control the data exchange between source and destination nodes. Communication protocols enable to perform the network topology, and to propagate the data traffic between network entities. The main goal of our toolbox is to provide a complete software environment enabling the understanding of available communication algorithms, but also the design of new schemes in order to improve the traffic behaviour of any connection between two network entities.

NARVAL permits to generate random topologies according to various algorithms such as Locality, Waxman, and Barabasi-Albert and hierarchical models. The user can also design his own topology by providing nodes' coordinates, visualization parameters, and also links' information. The combination of these functions enables to build a large range of topologies with distinct routing properties. Thus the NARVAL module permits to study the impact of routing algorithms on the effectiveness of transmission protocols used by data communications on a network topology. We provide a set of basic functions to create network graphs, compute routing algorithms (AODV, BFS, DFS, Bellman-Ford, Dijkstra, Flood, Floyd-Warshall, Multiple Paths, RPL, ARC, etc.) on them and finally make statistical analysis on the data exchange. The mobility of nodes (Mobile/Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork MANET/ VANET) is also supported according to models such as Random Direction, Random Walk, Random Way Point, etc.

The target audience of this external module includes academics, students, engineers and scientists. We put some efforts to build detailed help files. The description of each function has been carefully done in order to facilitate the end users' comprehension. It is often accompanied with explicit diagrams. Our simulations and results obtained with NARVAL have been published in several IEEE international conferences and journals. This research contribution was partially supported by the following European FP7 projects: U2010 (http://www.u2010.eu), EFIPSANS (http://www.efipsans.org), IoT6 (http://www.iot6.eu) and BUTLER (http://www.iot-butler.eu).