The Network Simulator, Version 3

    --------------------------------

Table of Contents:

------------------

1) An overview

2) Building ns-3

3) Running ns-3

4) Getting access to the ns-3 documentation

5) Working with the development version of ns-3

Note:  Much more substantial information about ns-3 can be found at

http://www.nsnam.org

1) An Open Source project

-------------------------

ns-3 is a free open source project aiming to build a discrete-event

network simulator targeted for simulation research and education.   

This is a collaborative project; we hope that

the missing pieces of the models we have not yet implemented

will be contributed by the community in an open collaboration

process.

The process of contributing to the ns-3 project varies with

the people involved, the amount of time they can invest

and the type of model they want to work on, but the current

process that the project tries to follow is described here:

http://www.nsnam.org/developers/contributing-code/

This README excerpts some details from a more extensive

tutorial that is maintained at:

http://www.nsnam.org/documentation/latest/

2) Building ns-3

----------------

The code for the framework and the default models provided

by ns-3 is built as a set of libraries. User simulations

are expected to be written as simple programs that make

use of these ns-3 libraries.

To build the set of default libraries and the example

programs included in this package, you need to use the

tool 'waf'. Detailed information on how to use waf is

included in the file doc/build.txt

However, the real quick and dirty way to get started is to

type the command

  ./waf configure --enable-examples

followed by

  ./waf 

this README file. The files built will be copied in the

build/ directory.

The current codebase is expected to build and run on the

set of platforms listed in the RELEASE_NOTES file.

Other platforms may or may not work: we welcome patches to 

improve the portability of the code to these other platforms. 

3) Running ns-3

---------------

On recent Linux systems, once you have built ns-3 (with examples

enabled), it should be easy to run the sample programs with the

following command, such as:

  ./waf --run simple-global-routing

That program should generate a simple-global-routing.tr text 

trace file and a set of simple-global-routing-xx-xx.pcap binary

pcap trace files, which can be read by tcpdump -tt -r filename.pcap

The program source can be found in the examples/routing directory.

4) Getting access to the ns-3 documentation

-------------------------------------------

Once you have verified that your build of ns-3 works by running

the simple-point-to-point example as outlined in 3) above, it is

quite likely that you will want to get started on reading

some ns-3 documentation. 

All of that documentation should always be available from

the ns-3 website: http:://www.nsnam.org/documentation/.

This documentation includes:

  - a tutorial

  - a reference manual

  - models in the ns-3 model library

  - a wiki for user-contributed tips: http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/

  - API documentation generated using doxygen: this is

    a reference manual, most likely not very well suited 

    as introductory text:

    http://www.nsnam.org/doxygen/index.html

5) Working with the development version of ns-3

-----------------------------------------------

If you want to download and use the development version 

of ns-3, you need to use the tool 'mercurial'. A quick and

dirty cheat sheet is included in doc/mercurial.txt but

reading through the mercurial tutorials included on the

mercurial website is usually a good idea if you are not

familiar with it.

If you have successfully installed mercurial, you can get

a copy of the development version with the following command:

"hg clone http://code.nsnam.org/ns-3-dev"