Regain Control of Growing Dependencies in OMNeT++ Simulations

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.