Abstract :
[en] 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 is focusing on the analysis of network protocols and algorithms. 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 discover 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
evaluate and improve the traffic behavior and distribution on network topologies defined by the user.
NARVAL permits to generate random topologies according to various algorithms such as Locality,
Waxman, Barabasi-Albert and hierarchical models. The user can also design his own topology by
providing nodes' coordinates, visualization parameters, and also links' information that are necessary
for path calculation. The combination of these functions enables to build a large range of topologies
with distinct routing properties. The NARVAL module permits to study the impact of routing algorithms
on the effectiveness of transmission protocols used by data communications on a defined network
topology. We provide a set of basic functions in order 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 efficiency of data communications.
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).
