Installing the Wrowser

The Wrowser (an acronym for Wireless network simulator Result brOWSER) supports with a graphical interface the collection of results, extraction of measurements and creation of parameter plots. Furthermore, the Wrowser helps to create simulation campaigns with large parameter spaces. The Wrowser is a project separated from the openWNS and thus has to be installed independently.

Important

The following steps are only required if you want to use the Wrowse to view simulation results. To run a single simulation and to evaluate the results using the text-output files, the Wrowser is not needed.

Prerequisites

Similar to the openWNS the Wrowser relies third party software. Each of the listed libraries and programs below are freely available.

• python-qt4 A comprehensive set of Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform GUI/XML/SQL C++ framework from Qt Software
• python-qt4-dev Tools Development tools for python-qt4
• python-matplotlib A python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms.
• python-tk Python’s de-facto standard GUI (Graphical User Interface) package.
• python-scipy Python library for mathematics, science, and engineering
• pyqt4-dev-tools Various support tools for PyQt4 developers

Use the following command to install them in Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4 python-qt4-dev python-matplotlib python-tk python-scipy pyqt4-dev-tools

Installation

Similar to the openWNS installation, the Wrowser can be obtained and updated using Bazaar. The following command will checkout the current version of the Wrowser into the directory ‘wrowser’. Choose whatever you want as name.

$ bzr branch lp:openwns-wrowser wrowser
Branched 27 revision(s).
$ cd wrowser
$ scons

You should now be able to start the Wrowser using

$ bin/wrowser

It will open an empty window, see The initial, empty Wrowser window.

The initial, empty Wrowser window

Adding the wrowser-plugin into playground.py

The Wrowser comes with a plugin for the playground.py that supports the setup of simulation campaigns, i.e., a compiled version of the openWNS together with a configuration and a set of parameters that shall be simulated. Each simulation campaign also provides a tool to start, stop and query the status of the simulations.

The playground.py script of your openWNS installation gathers these plugins in all directories specified in the file playground.config, which is located in the directory .wns in your home folder. Open this file with an editor and add the following two lines:

[AdditionalPluginPaths]
path1 = [path to the wrowser]/wrowser/wrowser/playgroundPlugins

Of course, you must replace [path to the wrowser] with the directory where you have installed the Wrowser in the previous step.

The plugin itself needs to be able to import further python modules which are included in the Wrowser installation. To be able to find them, the Wrowser directory should be added to the PYTHONPATH environment variable, e.g., by appending the following line to your ~/.bashrc:

export PYTHONPATH=${PYTHONPATH}:[path to the wrowser]/wrowser

Then, go into your openWNS - directory created during the installation of the openWNS and call playground.py. If everything went right, you should see the new command preparecampaign:

$ ./playground.py
[...]
preparecampaign :  Prepare a simulation campaign.
[...]