NS2 lacked an existing framework for triggering events when a transmit buffer was empty. It also simulated a MAC layer that was of no concern to me in my network coding research and, in the case of wireless nodes, its models aimed to reflect the complex interplays found in reality such as shadowing and channel conjestion.

I wanted to simulate network coding over wireless networks in their simplest form - wireless networks with a dynamic topology, symmetric links, no inter-channel interference and a simple Gaussian loss model. Such a network facilitates research on coding whilst avoiding most environmental issues such as channel allocation, radio propagation artifacts and uni-directional links.

This simulator was thus born.

Written over a week, the humble feature set of this code is as follows:

• Simulates nodes on a 2D plane.
• Simulates a primitive exponential noise floor.
• Incorporates delays for speed-of-light transmission, processing time and additional random jitter.
• Event driven, currently supporting RECV, TX_EMPTY and user defined events.
• Includes GF(2) library for performing random linear network coding.
• Supports Random Linear Network Coding for distribution of content over the network.
• Extremely small code-base makes for easy learning and extensibility.