An approach to integration of network design and simulation tools

Abstract

There are available commercial and education network analysis, design, simulation and discovery tools in the market. They help the users/designers in many aspect but different tools are developed for different purposes. Thus, very often such tools are addressing different issues in the network design process, which are complementary to each other. Therefore, these tools can be used in a manner of complementing to each other to cover all aspects of user requirement and because of that there is a genuine need to integrate such tools. This paper is dedicated to the problem of integrating such independently developed network planning, network design and network simulation tools. It is looking at the problem of network meta description language as well as at principles of defining such language using current experience of various tools. Examples of the meta language definitions are shown as well as principles of building a software for conversion between different network models are illustrated.