Welcome to Sinalgo

Sinalgo is a simulation framework for testing and validating network algorithms. Unlike most other network simulators, which spend most time simulating the different layers of the network stack, Sinalgo focuses on the verification of network algorithms, and abstracts from the underlying layers: It offers a message passing view of the network, which captures well the view of actual network devices. Sinalgo was designed, but is not limited to simulate wireless networks.

The key to successful development of network algorithms is a comprehensive test suite. Thanks to the fast algorithm prototyping in JAVA, Sinalgo offers itself as a first test environment, prior to deploy the algorithm to the hardware. Prototyping in JAVA instead of the hardware specific language is not only much faster and easier, but also simplifies debugging. Sinalgo offers a broad set of network conditions, under which you may test your algorithms. In addition, Sinalgo may be used as a stand-alone application to obtain simulation results in network algorithms research.

Sinalgo's view of network devices is close to the view of real hardware devices (e.g. in TinyOS): A node may send a message to a specific neighbor or all its neighbors, react to received messages, set timers to schedule actions in the future, and much more.

Some of the key features of Sinalgo:

• Quick prototyping of your network algorithms in JAVA
• Straight forward extensibility to cover nearly any simulation scenario
• Many built-in, but still adjustable plug-ins
• High performance - run simulations with 100000s of nodes in acceptable time
• Support for 2D and 3D
• Asynchronous and synchronous simulation
• Customizable visualization of the network graph
• Platform independent - the project is written in Java
• Sinalgo is for free, published under a BSD license

• The mobility model describes how the nodes change their position over time. Examples are random waypoint, random walk, random direction, and many others.
• The connectivity model defines when two nodes are in communication range. The best known examples are the unit disk graph (UDG) and the quasi-UDG (QUDG).
• The distribution model is responsible to initially place the network nodes in the simulation area. E.g. place the nodes randomly, evenly distributed on a line or grid or according to a stationary regime of a mobility model.
• Use the interference model to define whether simultaneous message transmissions may interfere.
• The reliability model is a simplified form of the interference model and lets you define for every message whether it should arrive or not. E.g. drop one percent of all messages.
• Last but not least, the transmission model lets you define how long a message takes until it arrives at its destination.

Please refer to the Tutorial for more information on how to get started.

This software was developed by the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich.

Screenshots