New (unstable) IPSuite and OMNeT++ releases

A revised IPSuite (snapshot 20040322) has been made available. It requires OMNeT++ 3.0 alpha 3 which has also just been released. Read on to learn what’s new in IPSuite… First of all, lots of obscure points (QoS hooks, OutputQueue, etc) have been either eliminated or refactored for more clarity. If you were unable to figure out IPSuite in the past (so was I), try again now! IPSuite is the first model which uses dynamic loading of NED files, a feature newly introduced in 3.0. Many changes were done under the hood (in the C++ sources, see change log), but some improvements are also visible on the outside. For example, the modules representing network interfaces got moved outside the “NetworkLayers” module. Now they appear immediately as you open a host or router model, as you can see in the following screenshot (which depicts also MPLS, between L2 and L3). 
(click to enlarge) Operation has been made more transparent. A previous article has already mentioned routing tables. Other than that, contents of IP packets (and several other message types) are now also inspectable from the GUI. This was an immediate benefit of converting the hand-coded message classes to msg files. 
(click to enlarge) Several WATCH'ed counters have been added to the code, which keep track of the number of packets dropped, forwarded, delivered etc. These counters can make it easier to figure out if everything works in the model as expected, and they can be best view using the Find/Inspect Objects dialog (new in OMNeT++3.0) as shown in the next screenshot: 
(click to enlarge) This round of refactoring will be followed by addition of new features soon, such as support for Ethernet and possibly other network interfaces/L2 protocols, some auto-configuration and auto-routing capability and improved TCP.