Table of Contents

• 1.   Introduction
• 1.1 News and Highlights
• 1.2 Contributions and Collaborations
• 1.3 Statistics


• 2.   ns-3 Development
• 2.1 Release Schedule
• 2.2 Technical Progress
• 2.3 Actions and Open Issues


• 3.   ns-2 Maintenance
• 3.1 Release Schedule
• 3.2 Technical Progress
• 3.3 Actions and Open Issues

1.   Introduction

This monthly report summarizes the ns-3 project, a collaborative project funded under the following grants:

• NSF CNS-0551686 (University of Washington);   PIs: Tom Henderson and Sumit Roy
• NSF CNS-0551378 (Georgia Institute of Technology);   PI: George Riley
• NSF CNS-0551706 (International Computer Science Institute);  PI: Sally Floyd

1.1 News and Highlights

• The core ns-3 developers team met in Atlanta, GA from 12-13 April to discuss core ns-3 software architecture issues such as memory management, component managers, and interface-oriented component replacement, and we agreed on an approach to migrate the current codebase. More details are available below, and a summary report of our April meeting is available at http://www.nsnam.org/docs/meetings/april07.txt.

1.2 Contributions and Collaborations

• We regularly collaborate with the Planete research group at INRIA Sophia Antipolis. Mathieu Lacage is the lead developer.
• Gustavo Carneiro has been invited to become a developer/committer on the ns-3 project.

1.3 Statistics

• There were ~10800 downloads of ns-2 and ns-allinone packages from Sourceforge in April.
• There were 467 posts to the ns-users mailing list and 5 posts to the ns-developers mailing list in the past month.
• There are 20 open bugs on the ns-2 tracker
• There are 8 open bugs/issues on the ns-3 tracker. There are additionally several issues being tracked on the ns-3 wiki.

2.   ns-3 Development

2.1 Release Schedule

We plan to do the following in May:

• release a version of ns-3-dev with the key elements (nodes, network devices, channels) cut over to the new software architecture
• circulate a concise software architecture document
• move to a regular (monthly) development release cycle

Our roadmap is posted at http://www.nsnam.org/roadmap.html

2.2 Technical Progress

The project has settled on a node architecture based on interface- or component-oriented programming, on an overall low-level memory management policy based on reference counting, and on a system for enabling default values for member variables and classes in the system to be easily manipulated at run-time via the command-line or localized changes in the simulation script. A summary report of our April meeting is available at http://www.nsnam.org/docs/meetings/april07.txt.

The project is grateful for the assistance of Mathieu Lacage, who is leading the software development effort at this time.

2.3 Actions and Open Issues

We started in October to track open issues and bugs in a Bugzilla tracker: http://www.nsnam.org/bugzilla. So far, this tracker has not been really used. There is a separate ns-3 wiki issues list

3.   ns-2 Maintenance

The project is maintaining ns-2, nam-1, otcl, and tclcl while ns-3 is being developed.

• ns-2
• nam-1
• otcl and tclcl

Sven Ehlert has stepped down as Cygwin maintainer after several years in that capacity.

3.1 Release Schedule

The most recent maintenance release of ns-2 (ns-2.31) was on March 10. The next scheduled quarterly release would be in June.

3.2 Technical Progress

Nothing to report.

3.3 Actions and Open Issues

• ns-2 bugs are logged in a Sourceforge tracker.
• ns-2 patches (waiting for review) are logged in this patch tracker
• ns-2 tasks (TODO list) are logged in this task tracker
• nam-1 tasks (TODO list) are logged in this task tracker

The below are the major action items and open issues.

ns-2 validation problems

Owner: None.

Description: Certain validation tests have been failing on various platforms (Cygwin, Fedora Linux) while passing on FreeBSD for several release versions.

Status: Cygwin and 64-bit Linux are the main open issues right now, although the latest Ubuntu Feisty Fawn distribution appears to have issues with a new gcc version.