8.2 POSIX-like sockets API

this capability is under development and is scheduled for inclusion in the ns-3.5 releasetimeframe; see the repository http://code.nsnam.org/mathieu/ns-3-simu for details

The below is excerpted from Mathieu's post to ns-developers list on April 4, 2008.

"To summarize, the goal is that the full posix/socket API is defined in src/process/simu.h: each posix type and function is re-defined there with a simu_ or SIMU_ prefix to avoid ugly name clashes and collisions (feel free to come up with a better prefix).

Each process is created with a call to ProcessManager::Create and is attached to that ProcessManager instance. So, if the ProcessManager (which is aggregated to a Node in src/helper/process-helper.cc) is killed when the simulation ends, the system will automatically reclaim all the resources of each process associated to each manager. The same happens when an application "exits" from its main function.

The example application defines two posix "processes": the function ClientProgram creates a udp socket on the localhost port 2000 and the function ServerProgram creates a udp socket on the localhost port 2000. The code does not work right now because I did not get the details of simu_read right yet but, I do plan to make this work at some point.

I really think that this approach is worthwhile for many reasons, a few of which are outlined below:

• makes porting real world application code _much_ easier
• makes write applications for new users much easier because they can read the bsd socket api reference and documentation and write code directly.
• can be used to write applications which work in both simulation and in the real world at the same time. To do this, all you have to do is write your application to use the simu_ API, and, then, you can chose at compile-time which implementation of that API you want to use: you can pick one implementation which forwards all calls to the system BSD socket API or another one which forwards all calls to the attached ProcessManager. Arguably, I did not implement the version which forwards to system BSD sockets but, that should be pretty trivial.

So, anyway, comments about the overall API would be welcome. Students interested in the gsoc project for real-world code integration should consider looking at this also."

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