Introduction

Overview

Direct Code Execution (DCE) is a module for ns-3 that provides facilities to execute, within ns-3, existing implementations of userspace and kernelspace network protocols or applications without source code changes. For example instead of using the pseudo application provided by ns-3 V4PingHelper you can use the true ping.

Manual Structure

This document consists of the following parts:

0. Quick Start Guide: The document describes a quick instruction of DCE.
1. User’s Guide: The document is for people who will use DCE to experiment.

DCE Outlook

• To run an application using DCE, it is not necessary to change its sources. However you will need to recompile them.
• The simulation is executed wholly within a single process which greatly facilitates the debugging.
• DCE is very memory-efficient, thanks to the way it loads the executables similarly to shared libraries.

Supported Features

• Simulation with POSIX socket application (no manual modifications)
• C/C++ applications
• Simulation with Linux kernel implemented network protocol

• IPv4/IPv6
• TCP/UDP/DCCP
• running with POSIX socket applications and ns-3 socket applications
• configuration via sysctl-like interface
• multiple nodes debugging with single gdb interface
• memory analysis by single valgrind execution with multiple nodes

• Variance of network stacks

• ns-3 native stack (IPv4/IPv6, partially)
• network simulation cradle network stack (IPv4 TCP only)
• Linux network stack (IPv4/IPv6/others)

• per-node configuration/stdin input
• per-node syslog/stdout/stderr files output

Tested Applications

• CCNx
• Quagga
• iperf
• ping/ping6
• ip (iproute2 package)
• Mobilt IPv6 daemon (umip)
• Linux kernel (from 2.6.36 to 3.7 versions)
• http server (thttpd)
• torrent (libtorrent from rasterbar + opentracker)

Tested Environment

Currently, DCE only supports Linux-based operating system. DCE has been tested on the following distributions:

• Ubuntu 10.04 32bit/64bit
• Ubuntu 10.10 32bit/64bit
• Ubuntu 11.04 32bit/64bit
• Ubuntu 11.10 32bit/64bit
• Ubuntu 12.04 32bit/64bit
• Ubuntu 12.10 64bit
• Fedora 14 32bit/64bit
• Fedora 15 32bit/64bit
• Fedora 16 32bit/64bit
• Fedora 18 32bit

but you can try on the others (e.g., CentOS, RHEL). If you got run on another distribution, please let us know.