The Network Simulator, Version 3

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Table of Contents:

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1) An Open Source project

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the missing pieces of the models we have not yet implemented

will be contributed by the community in an open collaboration

process.

Contributing to the ns-3 project is still a very informal

process because that process depends heavily on the background

of the people involved, the amount of time they can invest

and the type of model they want to work on.  

Despite this lack of a formal process, there are a number of 

steps which naturally stem from the open-source roots of the

project.  These steps are described in doc/contributing.txt

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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 use waf is 

included in the file doc/build.txt

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

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

build/debug or build/optimized.

The current codebase is expected to build and run on the

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

improve the portability of the code to these other platforms. 

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On recent Linux systems, once you have built ns-3, it 

should be easy to run the sample programs with the

following command:

./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

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

the simple-point-to-point example as outlined in 4) 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/ but we

include some of it in this release for ease of use.

This documentation includes:

  - a tutorial

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

  - an 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

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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"