1.2 Longer-term vision

The PIs and developers on the project envision that ns-3 can become more than a basic iteration of previous simulator approaches. Here is an incomplete list of the features that are of interest to add:

• Core refactoring: While striving to maintain as much model reuse as possible (including a backward compatibility capability), we plan to rearchitect the simulator for better ease of use, scalability (principally by class redesign, natively supporting multi-processor and distributed simulations, and support for 64-bit machines), encapsulation, and support for integration of other software. The simulator should easily, with realistic models at different levels of abstraction, allow for simulations of IPv4 and IPv6 networks, as well as novel, research-oriented network architectures.

• Software and testbed integration: We see a tremendous opportunity, with an open-source simulator, to leverage the software developed under other open-source projects. We have three specific goals in mind:
  1. Abstraction layers, interfaces, and new techniques for supporting implementation code within the ns-3 environment, such as ports of popular operating system implementations and routing daemons;
  2. Support for standard input and output file formats, so that existing tools can be used for generating simulation input and analyzing simulation output (e.g., pcap-formatted traces for viewing with tcpdump);
  3. Techniques to allow users to easily migrate experiments between simulation and network emulation environments.

• Wireless models. The ns-2 simulator needs updating to account for the growth in wireless networking, including the many variants of IEEE 802.11 networking, emerging IEEE standards such as WiMax (802.16), and cellular data services (GPRS, CDMA). Additional new models beyond wireless are also needed, such as peer-to-peer and delay-tolerant networks.

• Education. ns-3 is first and foremost a simulator for the academic research community. However, our project will emphasize making ns-3 more useful to educators with a specific goal of its integration into undergraduate networking courses.