TDMH: A time deterministic wireless network stack

Before you begin

This codebase has been tested only on Linux so far. It may or may not work under Windows.

More in detail, it relies on symbolic links and bash scripts.

Setup Tools

Two main tools are needed:

• The wandstem-flash-utility for flashing a binary file to the WandStem nodes. cmake is needed to compile this tool.
• The tdmh-visualizer which enriches the debugging experience by showing the network topology in real-time. To compile it, qt5 and qmake are needed.

Make sure to have the required dependencies installed and then use the provided scripts/install_tools.sh script to correctly setup them.

OMNeT++ Setup

• Download OMNeT++ 5.3 from https://www.omnetpp.org/
• Extract the downloaded file

Follow the instructions in the doc/InstallGuide.pdf, more in detail:

• Make sure you have the dependencies

sudo apt install build-essential gcc g++ bison flex perl \
qt5-default libqt5opengl5-dev tcl-dev tk-dev libxml2-dev \
zlib1g-dev default-jre doxygen graphviz libwebkitgtk-1.0

• Edit configure.user and set

WITH_OSG=no
WITH_OSGEARTH=no

• Enter the extracted folder an run . setenv && ./configure && make -jN with N number of your CPU cores
• Add the following line to your ~/.profile

export PATH=$PATH:/<where you extracted the archive>/omnetpp-5.3/bin

• Source the updated profile with source ~/.profile or logout and login
• Now you should be able to launch the simulator with the omnetpp command
• At the first launch, the simulator will ask you for a working directory, choose tdmh/simulator/
• Close the Welcome window
• You will be asked to install the INET framework or OMNeT++ programming examples, do not install those as they aren't used in this project.
• Now select File->Open Project from File System, and select the following folder by pressing the "Directory" button tdmh/simulator/WandstemMac
• Now you can close the "Embedded browser" window

Getting started with the simulator

Before being able to use the simulator you have to generate OMNeT++ makefiles and do a first build. DO NOT skip this step.

• Run the following commands

cd simulator/WandstemMac/src
opp_makemake -I. -lpthread -f --deep
cd ..
MODE=debug make

The simulator code is in the simulator directory, which contains

• WandstemMac which is the OMNeT++ simulation code. The 'main' of the root node and generic node is in the src/RootNode.cpp and src/Node.cpp files. The src directory contains the wrapper code for the Miosix OS API under OMNeT++, and a symbolic link to the network stack common code. src/simulations contains some example topologies.
• simulation_scripts contains automated simulation campaigns to measure e.g: network formation time as a function of the network size. These are bash scripts which run the OMNeT++ simulator repeatedly and parse results.
• tools are some scripts to automatically generate .ned files and parse results used by simulation_scripts

To run an example within the OMNeT++ IDE

• Double click on one of the topologies (*.ned files) from the Project window on the left, they are located in WandstemMac/simulations
• Press on the green Play button (Run) on the upper toolbar
• When asked whether to switch to Release Configuration, say No
• Another window will open, you can run the simulation by using the "Start" buttons on the top left.

Getting started with WandStem nodes

TODO

WandStem nodes webpage: https://miosix.org/wandstem.html

Flashing an executable

WandStem nodes have two buttons: one is used for resetting the board while the other one is a user programmable button.
The WandStem user button is also needed for flashing an executable to the board: keep it pressed while powering up the device to make it entering the programming mode, then use the wandstem-flash-utility to flash it.

wandstem-flash-utility -m u -f main.bin can be used to flash the main.bin file using the USB mode.

Otherwise, the TDMH makefile provides the make program command to achieve the same result.
Command make all program can alternatively be used both for compiling the project and automatically flashing the resulting executable to the WandStem board.