Interactive web visualizer for IEEE 802.11ah ns-3 module

The main purpose of running ns-3 simulations is to generate relevant data sets for further study. There are two strategies to generate output from ns-3, either using generic predefined bulk output mechanisms or using the ns-3's Tracing system. Both require parsing the raw output data to extract and process the data of interest to obtain meaningful information. However, parsing such output is in most cases time consuming and prone to mistakes. Post-processing is even harder when a large number of simulations needs to be analyzed and even the tracing system cannot simplify this task. Moreover, results obtained this way are only available once the simulation is finished.Therefore, we developed a user-friendly interactive visualization and post-processing tool for IEEE 802.11ah called ahVisualizer. Beside the topology and MAC configuration, ahVisualizer also plots our traces for each node over time during the simulation, as well as averages and standard deviations for each traced parameter. It can compare all the measured values across different simulations. Users can easily download figures and data in various formats. Moreover, it includes a post-processing tool which plots desired series, with desired fixed parameters, from a large set of simulations. This paper presents the ahVisualizer, its services and its architecture and shows how this tool enables much faster and easier data analysis and monitoring of ns-3 simulations with 802.11ah.