ns-3 monthly report

August 2006

Prepared by: Tom Henderson

This document is available at http://www.nsnam.org

Table of Contents


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
For more information and to participate in the project, see http://www.nsnam.org.

1.1 News and Highlights

  • This project held a kickoff meeting by invitation, at at ICIR (Berkeley, CA) on August 9-11 (by invite only). The meeting was very productive; the development team came to initial consensus on a number of technical and project infrastructure issues.
  • Georgia Tech and Mathieu Lacage (INRIA) contributed to set up initial project infrastructure (web and code servers, build environment) and Mathieu checked in initial core simulation code.

1.2 Contributions and Collaborations

We regularly collaborate with the Planete research group at INRIA Sophia Antipolis.

  • Mathieu Lacage attended our kickoff meeting and has played a major role in setting up the Mercurial code repositories, software build environment, and initial core software (ported from yans).

We had participation at the kickoff meeting from Steve Reinhardt (M5 simulator), Shashi Guruprasad (Emulab), Pedro Ruiz (DIIC, Murcia), Larry Dunn and Mod Marawathe (Cisco), Steve McCanne and Andrew Swan (Riverbed), Charles Perkins and Karim Seada (Nokia), and Michele Weigle (Old Dominion).

1.3 Statistics

2.   ns-3 Development

2.1 Release Schedule

The project is hoping to have a very early alpha release by January 2007.

2.2 Technical Progress

Agreements reached at the kickoff meeting are documented in the separate kickoff meeting report.

2.3 Actions and Open Issues

Develop and circulate a proposed initial development schedule
Owner: Tom H.
Description: Update what was put into the proposal.
Status: We agreed on a strawman schedule at the kickoff meeting. George Riley is working on a revision.

Start a project web site and source code control server.
Owner: George R.
Description: We need an operational web server, tracker (bugzilla), and source code control server.
Status: This infrastructure is mostly set up; there are some lingering issues with configuration of the web/bugzilla server.

New tinderboxes for better validation build environment
Owner: Tom H.
Status: Initial machine (Fedora Core 5 x86) setup with Vmware server at University of Washington..

3.   ns-2 Maintenance

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

3.1 Release Schedule

Planning the next release of ns-2 and related packages in September 2006.

Planned features (see the ns-2 changelog):

  • SCTP code update
  • Major XCP code cleanup
  • TFRC updates
  • Adding DelayBox and PackMimeHTTP models

Remaining major issues:

  • Certain validation tests are failing on several platforms
  • nam-1 does not build on 64-bit machines
  • nam-1 relicensing

We plan to make quarterly maintenance releases starting in January 2007.

3.2 Technical Progress

  • None to report

3.3 Actions and Open Issues

The below are the major action items and open issues.

relicense nam-1
Owner: Tom H. (with support from John H.)
Description: Align all nam licenses to be GPL-compatible.
Status: No change since last month.

nam-1 on 64-bit platforms
Owner: None.
Description: nam-1 won't build on 64-bit machines
Status: No change since last month.