BU NS FAQ

1. How are colors assigned to packets?

   The colors are associated with the fid_ values in each packet header. The default fid_ for each packet can be set on a per agent basis. You should set fid_ in the agent creating the packet. For example, consider the following code snippets from mfec.tcl

   ...
   # Associate green with packet fid_ = 1 (sender)
   $ns color 1 green 
   ...
   # Create FEC Sender agent
   set FECSnd [new Agent/FEC/Snd]
   ...
   # Set packet ID of packets from sender
   $FECSnd set fid_ 1
   ...
   

   This conclusion is based on the following message to the mailing list:

   
   Haobo Yu (haoboy@isi.edu)
   Mon, 23 Feb 1998 10:56:50 -0800 (PST) 
   
   > I wounder how commands like:
   > $ns set color 0 blue 
   > $ns set color 1 red 
   > $ns set color 2 yellow
   > $ns set color 3 green ....
   > affects the colors of the datapackets in the nam visualization? I
   > noticed that changing the flowid_ to 3 makes the packages green in my example.
   > In my sense of thinking there must be other reasons when you want to
   > color packages in diffrent colors, than when they belong to diffrent
   > flows according to ipv6, I've run most of the testcripts and
   > noticed they are very colorfull. 
   
   In nam trace file, every packet have an 'attribute' field, which is
   produced by 'fid_' of data sources in your simulation scripts. The colors
   defined by above commands builds a 1-1 mapping between colors to the
   'fid's. Therefore, you may change the fid_ of your packets as a means to
   label them with different colors.
   
   You may find the details of nam trace file format in nam's man page.
   Please let me know if you have further questions.
   
   Regards,
   Haobo
   
   

   (Lingering question: How do the default fid_ values get set (e.g. 30/31 for prune/graft messages)?)

2. How do I make losses occur on specific links?

   Here is a TCL script showing one way to use the loss model.

3. It appears that in NAM the first person that opens up NAM on a particular gets all of the NAM windows, even if they are created by other users. That is, if I am on AIM, I am running NAM, and Sunila tries to run NAM on AIM, her NAM windows will actually pop up on MY console. Spooky.

   
   One possible solution
   by expert TCL programmer, Sunila:
   
   1. Go to the file anim-ctrl.tcl in the nam-1.0a7/tcl directory.
   2. Jump to function remote-create-animator
   3. Comment out the whole if/else statement
   4. Insert the following before the commented if/else statement:
   
   puts -nonewline "Cannot connect to existing nam instance. "
   puts "Starting a new one..."
   $self local-create-animator $trace_file [join $args]
   
   You may notice that these are the lines in the "if" part of the if/else statement.
   5. In directory nam-1.0a7, type make. This should recompile NAM so that every time you run it a NEW NAM console is created.