Contents

Experiment dialogue window

Figure 6: Experiment dialogue window

The window includes the following items:

Experiment

text field for the experiment file name; two buttons, namely Save and Save as accompany this item. There is a Select button to assist the selection procedure. (Default value: unnamed.exp). The experiment file saves all the information on the window, which are necessary to run the experiement.An experiment is created by choosing the following items and saved by pressing the Save button with a file name in the experiment text field.

Protocol

text field for the name of the protocol to be simulated and/or animated. There is a Select button to assist the selection procedure. (Default value: empty; the user must fill in a value before executing the simulation of the experiment). How to create a new protocol is presented in Section 5.

Network

text field for network description file to be used for the DIAS simulation. There is a Select button to assist the selection procedure. (Default value: empty; the user must fill in a value before executing the simulation of the experiment). How to create a new network is presented in Section 6.

Link failures

on/off button to denote whether simulation of link failures is requested from this experiment (Default: off; the user should turn it on only if the protocol to be simulated tolerates link failures). If on, then the maximum number of faulty links, as well as the type of failures (intermittent or stop) should also be specified (default values: 0, stop failures). For more details, refer to Section 4.3.2.

Debug options

This field is used to select different set of debug messages. Each option corresponds to a class of trace information that will be output to the trace (debug) file upon execution of the experiment. For more details, refer to Section 7.1.

Runs

the number of simulator executions for the current experiment parameters.

Visualization

an on/off button, indicating whether any kind of visualization is desired. If it is on (which is also the dafault value), there are two possibilities:

ascii monitoring

: this is a visual (ascii) output interafce, which monitors the execution and which is provided directly from the DIAS simulation (for non-multiple executions). For more details, refer to Section 3.4

Graphical Animation

: This corresponds to execution of the corresponding animation program for the protocol that is chosen for simulation. In this case the Animation Program has to be specified, see bellow.

Note: at the present version the mapping is not automatic; the user should be aware of this choice.

Debug file

text field for the debug file name (if empty, the system will chose automatically a name, equal to debug.experiment_file_name). There is a select button to assist the selection procedure.

Animation Program

text field for the name of an animation program (which, as explained earlier, should be suitable to animate executions of the chosen protocol). There is a select button to assist the selection procedure. (Default value: the animator program specified in the configuaration file)

Buttons

Finally, there is a set of buttons to support standard functions, such as Cancel and OK, as well as the following procedures:

Default

for setting default values for dialog fields. It means, in the most cases to clear them. It is useful to create a completely new experiment description.

Run

to invoke the DIAS simulator with the values specified in the current experiment dialogue window. Before starting the execution the current directory is set to directory protocols_path (see Section 2.2). If the Visualization button is on and the Graphical Animation possibility has been chosen the animation program will also be executed besides the simulation. This corresponds to the on-line execution of the animation.

Animate

to invoke the animation program shown in the respective field in the dialogue window. This corresponds to the off-line execution of the animation, i.e. the simulator will not be invoked. Before starting this program the current directory is set to directory animators_path (see Section 2.2).

Note: the Visalization button should be on and the Graphical Animation possibility should have been chosen; otherwise, nothing will happen in response to pressing this button.
 

Note: all programs specified in the dialogue window must be in the corresponding path given in the configuration file, as described in the previous section; otherwise, the file name should be pended with the path where it can be found.

2002-11-11