The Network Simulator, Version 3

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Table of Contents:

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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 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

2) An overview of the ns-3 project

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

This package contains the latest version of ns-3 which 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 'waf'. Detailed information on how to install

and 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" the the directory which contains

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

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 

  - cygwin

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:

./waf --run 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 "./waf --doxygen" 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"