London Metropolitan University, Faculty of Computing CT3020 Network Planning and Simulation

Delite Tutorial 1: Introduction to the WAN Design Tool Delite

Goal of the Session: to get familiar with the Wide Area Network design tool Delite (Design Environment Light). Equipment: MS Windows workstations, tool Delite installed according to the current version of the build and demo files. Brief introduction to Delite: The tool was created for education purposes and its functionality was derived from the tool Intrepid used by the IBM Network Laboratory for commercial projects in 1990s. Examples of tool Delite usage is described in the book "Wide Area Network Design: Concepts and Tools for Optimization" by R.S.Cahn, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, 1998. Robert Cahn used to work in the IBM Network Laboratory. The tool was originally implemented as an application written in C for Windows 98 and as such requires no installation in a sense of the recent versions of MS Windows, i.e. it starts by simple launching of the file delite.exe . For the home use tool Delite is available for downloading as .zip archive from the modules web-site. When extracted and configured it comes with the following 3 directories (here X: is a name of a drive with write access where Delite is located, e.g. USB flash-drive): - X:\Delite\PROGRAM - contains main program and additional subroutines - X:\Delite\DESDIR - DEStination DIRectory, contains essential working files and place for storing final files - X:\Delite\SOURCE - contains a number of source files in C for experimenting Design of WAN by Delite consists of the following steps: 1. Manual creating of the .gen (=generator) file which contains description of sites for the WAN to be designed. It includes site names, coordinates, populations, etc according to the specific format readable by Delite. This is a flat ASCII file organised according to the predefined width columns which define the meaning of the value contained in the column. Following to this format is crucial for preparing correct input data about sites. 2. Automatic creating of the .inp (=inputs) which describes names of files containing all necessary files i.e. it is linkage file. During generating of the .inp file consistency of the corresponding .gen file is checked. 3. Reading the .inp file which brings on the screen names and locations of the WAN sites as defined in the corresponding .gen file. 4. Using various embedded design algorithms (which may require defining additional parameters) for generating WAN topologies and link capacities. Designs are visualised on the screen. Additional design parameters are shown on the smaller side windows. A number of additional information can be generated for the given design in order to make decision. 5. Storing selected designs to the external .net file which contains information about the sites according to the .gen file and links between the sites generated by the algorithms. Practical exercise: 1. Start tool Delite from the available installation. 2. Inspect all the options in the menu of the program. 3. Start documentation browsers: in the menu select Documentation/View Delite Docs and Documentation/Algorithm Tutorial. Browse through Delite documentation to familiarise with functionality of the tool. 4. Create Input File (this is an example with ready file): In the menu select File/Generate Input

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5. 6.

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In the list of .gen files which appears on the screen highlight C4P10.GEN and click [Open]. File C4P10.INP will be generated (see message in the Delite Monitor window). Load input file to the tool: in the menu select File/Read Input File . In the list of .inp files which appears on the screen highlight C4P10.INP and click [Open]. Nodes of the network with their names will appear in the design window. Apply various network design algorithms to the loaded data by choosing options in the Design menu and observe how network topology and LINK_COST (total cost of the links for given topology, cost of nodes by default is ignored) are changing with each algorithm (some algorithms may produce the same design as others): Prim PrimDijkstra - try a few times with different parameters: Start from default value of Alpha=0.2 Increase Alpha by 0.1 and repeat again until Alpha=1. Observe changes in the degree of starness of the generated topology Change a name of the Center node and repeat above two steps again Tour (Nearest Neighbor) Tour (Furthest Neighbor) Esau-Williams Sharma MSTD Mentor - use default parameter values and click [Start]. Explore how changes of parameters affect designs. MENTour (Furthest N) - use default parameter values and click [Start]. Explore how changes of parameters affect designs. MENTour (Nearest N) - use default parameter values and click [Start]. Explore how changes of parameters affect designs. IncreMENTOR - use default parameter values and click [Start]. Explore how changes of parameters affect designs. Calculate Delay and other related values: In the menu select Analyze/Delay Analysis In the appeared Delite Monitor window with the results of the calculation find values of the following parameters: AVE_NODE_DEL - average node delay AVE_LINK_DEL - average link delay AVE_DEL_TOT - average total delay AVE_#_HOPS - average number of hops needed for transferring a packet between the nodes in the network MAX_UTIL - maximum utilization Visualization of Utilization. Observe differently coloured links according to the calculated Utilization and a legend explaining colour codes (can be also activated by Display/Utilization). Change network design by applying different algorithms and run delay analysis again. Observe changing values. Generate and load random network. In the menu select File/Random Net in SqWd and put the following parameters in the appeared window (click [Start] when finished): Number of nodes: 30 Number Centers: 1 Seed: 1 File name: n30.gen
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Traffic Type: ACCESS Traffic Profile: 1200.TPF Generate n30.inp file in a similar manner as in pt. 5 above. Load input file in a similar manner as in pt. 6 above. 9. Calculating network Reliability for current network design. Run Analyze/Reliability Analysis. Read calculated value of RELIABILITY in the Delite Monitor window. 10. Printing network design. It is not possible to print it directly from Delite to the printer - it is necessary to create printer file in the Encapsulated PostScript format (.eps format is predecessor of .pdf format and PDF printer drivers normally can handle it by converting to .pdf format) instead: In the menu toggle printing parameters by selecting Print/Include Legend and Print/Encapsulated PS. You may also try to toggle Landscape parameter in the same menu. After that run Print/Print to File and define file name when prompted (e.g. n30.ps). Open .eps file created by Delite with Ghostview or PDF print driver and print it in the usual manner. Pictures also can be printed by importing .eps/.pdf files to Word documents. 11. Using background maps. Tool Delite has a set of ready to use country maps which can be used as a background for network design in order to make it more realistic. However, a set of maps is limited, data formats are not documented and therefore this part of the exercise is for illustration only and meant not to be used in the actual coursework. Maps can be activated as follows: In the menu select Display/Select Map File and highlight a file with the map from the appeared list (choose e.g. USAVHD.MET). Try to print it as described above. Try to experiment with different maps. Observe that appearing map sizes are proportional to the relative country sizes. It is possible to select all the nodes in the design area by drawing a "rubber square" around them with the help of the Left mouse button and after that drag all of them over the map.

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