ns-3 monthly report

October 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

1.2 Contributions and Collaborations

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

  • David Wei joined the ns-2 developers with commit access, to focus on TCP improvements.

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

The core development team hit a snag when defining the node architecture, based on some disagreements on the software design pattern for interconnecting node objects. We resolved to define a set of strawman code proposals and documentation, and solicit feedback on the developers list, before taking a decision by the end of November. I estimate that this will set us back about a month in our current roadmap.

Mathieu Lacage volunteered to start an "ns-3 wireless PHY" project whose aim is to build a set of physical-level models for wireless mediums able to accomodate the needs of a broad spectrum of users, including 802.11 variants, Bluetooth, GSM/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS, satellite, and WiMax, (others depending on developer interest). This proposed project generated several positive responses from other researchers on the list. Mathieu is coordinating this activity with Sumit Roy.

October marked the first month of regular technical discussion on the ns-developers mailing list. Some users have already contributed patches to our code base. In the month of October, the following issues were discussed on the list:

  • the Time object API and arithmetic operations on it
  • use of environment variables in build environment
  • cross-layer architecture
  • code readability issues
  • Python-related patches

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.

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

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

  • Iyappan Ramachandran and Tom Henderson restored the daily ns-2 validation scripts on a new regression machine: ns-regression.ee.washington.edu
  • Michele Weigle is working to bring the ns-2 code back into compatibility with Solaris.
  • Sally Floyd has been checking in a number of extensions to the TCP code.

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. Looking for volunteer to look into this.

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.