3.4 Sockets and Applications

Applications are user defined processes that generate traffic to send across the networks to be simulated. ns-3 provides a framework for developing different types of applications that have different traffic patterns. There is an Application base class that allows one to define new traffic generation patterns via inheritance from this class. Then one simply creates the application and associates it with a node, and the application will send traffic down the protocol stack. The way that applications on a node communicate with the node's protocol stack is via sockets.