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

• Raj Bhattacharjea (raj.b@gatech.edu) joined the NSF-funded project as a full-time developer at Georgia Tech
• Craig Dowell (craigdo@ee.washington.edu) joined the NSF-funded project as a full-time developer at University of Washington
• The core development team focused on the node design and key interfaces (network to mac and application to sockets), working towards an initial functional (pre-alpha) ns-3 release at the end of February.

1.2 Contributions and Collaborations

We regularly collaborate with the Planete research group at INRIA Sophia Antipolis. Mathieu Lacage is the lead developer.

• Mathieu contributed an initial proposal for queueing API for the ns-3 NetDevice class.
• In December, Mathieu contributed a proposal for a smart pointer implementation for ns-3 (mail message here), and also a user-space thread API (mail message here).
• Iyappan Ramchandran contributed several updates to the 802.15.4 WPAN module for ns-2 (mail message here)
• Michele Weigle helped to test and marshal in a number of fixes for Solaris compatibility, contributed originally by Emil Mikulic

1.3 Statistics

• There were ~9200 downloads of the current ns-2.30 and ns-allinone-2.30 packages from Sourceforge in January
• There were 269 posts to the ns-users mailing list and 27 posts to the ns-developers mailing list in the past month.
• There are 21 open bugs on the ns-2 tracker
• There are 1 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

As mentioned above, the project is hoping to have a pre-alpha release by February 2007. Details are found in this mailing list post: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2006-November/002646.html

2.2 Technical Progress

The core development team focused on the node design and key interfaces (network to mac and application to sockets), working towards an initial functional (pre-alpha) ns-3 release at the end of February.

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.

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

3.1 Release Schedule

The next release of ns-2 (ns-2.31, nam-1.13) is tentatively scheduled for mid-February. What's new:

• various support issues for new compilers or OS distributions
• nam-1 does build on 64-bit machines
• nam-1 relicensing
• revised 802.15.4 WPAN module
• changes to PackMime-HTTP HTTP/1.1 behavior

We plan to make quarterly maintenance releases starting in 2007 or shortly thereafter.

3.2 Technical Progress

• Iyappan Ramchandran contributed several updates to the 802.15.4 WPAN module for ns-2 (mail message here)
• Michele Weigle helped to test and marshal in a number of fixes for Solaris compatibility, contributed originally by Emil Mikulic

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.

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.

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.