A Discrete-Event Network Simulator
Tutorial

Resources

The Web

There are several important resources of which any ns-3 user must be aware. The main web site is located at http://www.nsnam.org and provides access to basic information about the ns-3 system. Detailed documentation is available through the main web site at http://www.nsnam.org/documentation/. You can also find documents relating to the system architecture from this page.

There is a Wiki that complements the main ns-3 web site which you will find at http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/. You will find user and developer FAQs there, as well as troubleshooting guides, third-party contributed code, papers, etc.

The source code may be found and browsed at http://code.nsnam.org/. There you will find the current development tree in the repository named ns-3-dev. Past releases and experimental repositories of the core developers may also be found there.

Mercurial

Complex software systems need some way to manage the organization and changes to the underlying code and documentation. There are many ways to perform this feat, and you may have heard of some of the systems that are currently used to do this. The Concurrent Version System (CVS) is probably the most well known.

The ns-3 project uses Mercurial as its source code management system. Although you do not need to know much about Mercurial in order to complete this tutorial, we recommend becoming familiar with Mercurial and using it to access the source code. Mercurial has a web site at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/, from which you can get binary or source releases of this Software Configuration Management (SCM) system. Selenic (the developer of Mercurial) also provides a tutorial at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/Tutorial/, and a QuickStart guide at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/QuickStart/.

You can also find vital information about using Mercurial and ns-3 on the main ns-3 web site.

Waf

Once you have source code downloaded to your local system, you will need to compile that source to produce usable programs. Just as in the case of source code management, there are many tools available to perform this function. Probably the most well known of these tools is make. Along with being the most well known, make is probably the most difficult to use in a very large and highly configurable system. Because of this, many alternatives have been developed. Recently these systems have been developed using the Python language.

The build system Waf is used on the ns-3 project. It is one of the new generation of Python-based build systems. You will not need to understand any Python to build the existing ns-3 system.

For those interested in the gory details of Waf, the main web site can be found at http://code.google.com/p/waf/.

Development Environment

As mentioned above, scripting in ns-3 is done in C++ or Python. Most of the ns-3 API is available in Python, but the models are written in C++ in either case. A working knowledge of C++ and object-oriented concepts is assumed in this document. We will take some time to review some of the more advanced concepts or possibly unfamiliar language features, idioms and design patterns as they appear. We don’t want this tutorial to devolve into a C++ tutorial, though, so we do expect a basic command of the language. There are an almost unimaginable number of sources of information on C++ available on the web or in print.

If you are new to C++, you may want to find a tutorial- or cookbook-based book or web site and work through at least the basic features of the language before proceeding. For instance, this tutorial.

The ns-3 system uses several components of the GNU “toolchain” for development. A software toolchain is the set of programming tools available in the given environment. For a quick review of what is included in the GNU toolchain see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_toolchain. ns-3 uses gcc, GNU binutils, and gdb. However, we do not use the GNU build system tools, neither make nor autotools. We use Waf for these functions.

Typically an ns-3 author will work in Linux or a Linux-like environment. For those running under Windows, there do exist environments which simulate the Linux environment to various degrees. The ns-3 project has in the past (but not presently) supported development in the Cygwin environment for these users. See http://www.cygwin.com/ for details on downloading, and visit the ns-3 wiki for more information about Cygwin and ns-3. MinGW is presently not officially supported. Another alternative to Cygwin is to install a virtual machine environment such as VMware server and install a Linux virtual machine.

Socket Programming

We will assume a basic facility with the Berkeley Sockets API in the examples used in this tutorial. If you are new to sockets, we recommend reviewing the API and some common usage cases. For a good overview of programming TCP/IP sockets we recommend TCP/IP Sockets in C, Donahoo and Calvert.

There is an associated web site that includes source for the examples in the book, which you can find at: http://cs.baylor.edu/~donahoo/practical/CSockets/.

If you understand the first four chapters of the book (or for those who do not have access to a copy of the book, the echo clients and servers shown in the website above) you will be in good shape to understand the tutorial. There is a similar book on Multicast Sockets, Multicast Sockets, Makofske and Almeroth. that covers material you may need to understand if you look at the multicast examples in the distribution.

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