Final year
came so did season of final year project along with it came group making and
project we are supposed to do as B.E. students. My group chose a project which
required simulation of wireless sensor networks (our project was termed as a
vague topic for project till the very end :/ ), well I will tell those people
try to work in NS2 in 3 months time and get feel of it , and complete the
project , than you will know how vague it is (:P). Well we started working with
ns2 , first step for using any software it to install it , then understand it ,
and then do your work on it. We thought well installation is simple , let’s
just follow steps given in manual and there we will have ns2 installed to work
upon. But ns2 had planned otherwise *evil laugh from ns2*.
For installation of
ns2 on windows we need to install cygwin first (it’s a tool in which you can UNIX commands) and that was quite a task , took us 3 days to install it because its
mirror sites were well quite mischievous, than we started installing ns2 and *ns2
with louder evil laugh* was showing error in its files while installation , I
mean how can you have installation error if that package was downloaded from
ns2 official website , but never the less it was there, than we thought
something is wrong with cygwin (well it was 5 a.m. and brain tend to blame
anything and everything if work isn’t done :P).
Than one of my group members
was finally installed ns2 on his ubuntu, than we thought at last we can work on
our project , after getting initial feel of ns2 we came to know that we need to
add a module to it for sensor part as it doesn’t exist. I used to feel proud
that I worked on C++ for nearly 6 years, but after seeing backend of ns2 (which
is C++) I was like :O * mouth wide open*. From that time onwards I never
consider myself good in C++. Than hunt begin to see if we can find sensor
module , and we found it *jumping around in joy*. To integrate that module to
ns2 wasn’t actually fun ride , but thanks to few DOTA sessions in between I
kept on going trying , and finally it was done , later on I was caught up in
files submissions and after that I realized this module wasn’t actually that
beneficiary *Chan Se jo tute koi sapna, Jag suna suna lage Jag suna suna lage*.
*deepest sigh* than still did something
produced some results but not what I expected at start , than our guide gave as
a tool , and by than we were so good in installing ns2 , took us just 3 hrs to
install it and it produced part of result we desired *jumping around
yahoooooooo chahe koi mujhe jungle kahe*.
After installing it I realized I have
to give some simulation for it and with B.E. almost getting over our goal wasn’t
near by , than we were advised to use one more ns2 version *I was on verge of
going berserker mode thrashing every thing which will come in front of me* but
with Saiyed(one of my project partner) I still continued and voila some thing
happened in that version as well it was working fine but time was less , so
doing some jugaaad (can’t actually say it , but my friends know ;) ), showed some
thing for project but personally I wasn’t satisfied with my project.
Moral of
story for B.E. student going to work with NS2 : IF YOU ARE WORKING WITH NS2 OR GOING
TO WORK WITH NS2 , DO IT AT START OF FINAL YEAR
Ps: this was originally written for our department magazine, but was never published
