8.1 Motivation

There are many ways to get information out of a program. The most straightforward way is to just directly print the information to the standard output, as in,

  #include <iostream>
  ...
  int main ()
  {
    ...
    std::cout << ``The value of x is `` << x << std::endl;
    ...
  } 

This is workable in small environments, but as your simulations get more and more complicated, you end up with more and more prints and the task of parsing and performing computations on the output begins to get harder and harder.

Another thing to consider is that every time a new tidbit is needed, the software core must be edited and another print introduced. There is no standardized way to control all of this output, so the amount of output tends to grow without bounds. Eventually, the bandwidth required for simply outputting this information begins to limit the running time of the simulation. The output files grow to enormous sizes and parsing them becomes a problem.

ns-3 provides a simple mechanism for logging and providing some control over output via Log Components, but the level of control is not very fine grained at all. The logging module is a relatively blunt instrument.

It is desirable to have a facility that allows one to reach into the core system and only get the information required without having to change and recompile the core system. Even better would be a system that notified the user when an item of interest changed or an interesting event happened.

The ns-3 tracing system is designed to work along those lines and is well-integrated with the Attribute and Config substems allowing for relatively simple use scenarios.

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