Regain Control of Growing Dependencies in OMNeT++ Simulations

Abstract: When designing simulation models, it is favourable to reuse existing models as far as possible to reduce the effort from the first idea to simulation results. Thanks to the OMNeT++ community, there are several toolboxes available covering a wide range of network communication protocols. However, it can be quite a daunting task to handle the build process when multiple existing simulation models need to be combined with custom sources. Project references provided by the OMNeT++ Integrated Development Environment (IDE) are just partly up to the task because it can be barely automated. For this reason, a new approach is presented to build complex simulation models with the help of CMake, which is a wide-spread build tool for C and C++ projects. The resulting toolchain allows to handle dependencies conveniently without need for any changes in upstream projects and also takes special care of OMNeT++-specific aspects.