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 development team focused on the node design and key interfaces (network to mac and application to sockets), and finalizing the Time API and scheduler details.
• Tom Henderson announced a one-month slip in the development schedule and a new target for an early February pre-alpha release: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2006-November/002646.html

1.2 Contributions and Collaborations

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

• Michele Weigle's revised her PackMime implementation for HTTP in ns-2: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2006-November/002635.html
• Anush Elangovan contributed a 64-bit patch for nam-1, closing an open tracker issue: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2006-November/002595.html
• There was continued discussion, and list feedback, of the ns-3 wireless PHY project, being organized by Mathieu Lacage at INRIA.
• Sam Jansen announced another release of his Network Simulation Cradle. http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2006-November/002637.html
• A group of five postgraduate students at the European Institute of Technology have contacted George Riley about collaborating on a GUI and animator for ns-3.

1.3 Statistics

• There were ~8000 downloads of the current ns-2.30 and ns-allinone-2.30 packages from Sourceforge in November
• There were 298 posts to the ns-users mailing list and 123 posts to the ns-developers mailing list in the past month.
• There are 21 open bugs on the ns-2 tracker
• There are 3 open bugs/issues on the ns-3 tracker

2.   ns-3 Development

2.1 Release Schedule

As mentioned above, The project is hoping to have a pre-alpha release by January 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 has been defining a new node architecture, and used the month of November for evaluating skeleton code proposals and discussing the architectures both internally and on the list. We agreed internally and it was also independently suggested on the list to focus on defining a few key interfaces as a means of making progress.

We expect that the target of an early February release of some working code will prompt more decisions and code development in December and January.

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.

UW has begun to interview candidates for a full-time software development position on this project.

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 January. Goals:

• Certain validation tests are failing on several platforms
• nam-1 does not build on 64-bit machines
• nam-1 relicensing
• enable Tk to work with nam-1
• various support issues for new compilers or OS distributions

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

3.2 Technical Progress

• Michele Weigle is working to bring the ns-2 code back into compatibility with Solaris.
• Michele Weigle's revised her PackMime implementation for HTTP in ns-2: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2006-November/002635.html
• Anush Elangovan contributed a 64-bit patch for nam-1, closing an open tracker issue: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2006-November/002595.html

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.

nam-1 on 64-bit platforms

Owner: None.

Description: nam-1 won't build on 64-bit machines

Status: Believed to be resolved based on Anush Elangovan's contributed patch. This item will be removed from the list.

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: No change since last month. Looking for volunteer to look into this.