DANSE

This is the home of the DANSE network simulator.  There are a few things you should know about DANSE before going much further:

  • DANSE is NOT the fastest simulator on the planet (although it’s faster than many)
  • DANSE does NOT have the most accurate channel models on the planet (although I’ve lost count of how many papers I’ve read by researchers using less accurate models, and more accurate channel models for DANSE are coming soon)
  • DANSE is NOT the most flexible simulator on the planet (although you can do just about anything with a bit of programming)
  • DANSE does NOT have all the features of the most advanced simulators in terms of analysing and plotting results either, you have to use some other tools as well

That’s not really not the point.  The point is:

  • DANSE IS (as far as I know) the friendliest and easiest to use simulator out there.  It has a powerful GUI, and you can get interesting results very quickly, visualise how your protocols work, interact with them as the simulation progresses, and concentrate on learning about and designing protocols, rather than on how to drive the simulator.

To get a better idea of what it can do and what it looks like, visit the screenshots page.

It was originally written specifically for education, and in particular for a first-year (freshman) module in communication protocols.  I think it worked rather well. Thanks to the graphical outputs and debugging features it’s beginning to attract some interest for use in research projects as well.  If you’d like to try it out – be my guest. You can download a copy from the downloads page, along with the current user instructions and a sample lab script. If you’d like a copy of the source code, please get in touch (you’ll need this to extend the simulator and implement your own protocols; these can be programmed in either C or C#).

DANSE is now open-source, and the code can be found on github here: https://github.com/dajp1/danse

Comments are welcome – please contact me.