The Network Simulator, Version 3 -------------------------------- Table of Contents: ------------------ 1) An Open Source project 2) An overview of the ns-3 project 3) Building ns-3 4) Running ns-3 5) Getting access to the ns-3 documentation 6) Working with the development version of ns-3 1) An Open Source project ------------------------- ns-3 is an Open Source project. We intend to make this project a successful 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. Contributing to the ns-3 project is still a very informal process because that process depends heavily on the personality 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 2) An overview of the ns-3 project ---------------------------------- This package contains the latest version of ns-3 which is aims at being a replacement for ns-2. Currently, ns-3 provides a number of very simple network simulation models: - an ipv4 and udp stack - arp support at the bottom of the stack - point-to-point physical-layer links - OnOff traffic generator Our focus to date has been on getting an overall software framework in place. The framework is there to make adding new models as simple as possible: - an extensive tracing system can be used to connect any number of arbitrary trace sources to any number of trace sinks. This tracing system is decoupled from the act of serializing the trace events to a file: users can and should provide their own trace handling routines. - simple file trace serialization support is included to both text and pcap files. - adding new MAC-level models simply requires subclassing the pair of classes NetDevice and Channel. - adding new traffic generation algorithms is also very simple through the Application and the Socket classes. 3) 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 'scons'. Detailed information on how to install and use scons is included in the file doc/build.txt However, the real quick and dirty way to get started is to type the command "scons" the the directory which contains this README file. The files built will be copied in the build-dir/dbg-shared/bin and build-dir/dbg-shared/lib directories. build-dir/dbg-shared/bin will contain one binary for each of the sample code in the 'samples' directory and one binary for each of the detailed examples found in the 'examples' directory. The current codebase is expected to build and run on the following set of platforms: - linux x86 gcc 4.2, 4.1, and, 3.4. - linux x86_64 gcc 4.0 - MacOS X ppc and x86 The current codebase is expected to fail to build on the following platforms: - gcc 3.3 and earlier - optimized builds on linux x86 gcc 4.0 Other platforms may or may not work: we welcome patches to improve the portability of the code to these other platforms. 4) Running ns-3 --------------- On recent Linux systems, once you have built ns-3, it should be easy to run the sample programs with the following command: ./build-dir/dbg-shared/bin/simple-p2p or: cd build-dir/dbg-shared/bin ./simple-p2p That program should generate a simple-p2p.tr text trace file and a set of simple-p2p-xx-xx.pcap binary pcap trace files, which can be read by tcpdump. 5) Getting access to the ns-3 documentation ------------------------------------------- Once you have verified that your build of ns-3 works by running the simple-p2p 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: - an architecture document which describes a very high-level view of ns-3: it tries to explain the use-cases the ns-3 developers really focused on when doing the initial design and then goes on to explain the structure of the resulting framework. See the file doc/architecture.pdf - 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 If you want to re-generate this documentation, you can easily do so: - doc/architecture.pdf is generated from the architecture.tex file in http://code.nsnam.org/docs - the doxygen documentation is generated from the doc/doxygen.conf configuration file. The command "scons doc" will generate it as doc/html/index.html if you have installed the doxygen tools (see http://www.doxygen.org) 6) 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"