App Store Technical Requirements

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Goals

The long-term goal is to move ns-3 to separate modules, for build and maintenance reasons. For build reasons, since ns-3 is becoming large, we would like to allow users to enable/disable subsets of the available model library. For maintenance reasons, it is important that we move to a development model where modules can evolve on different timescales and be maintained by different organizations.

An analogy is the GNOME desktop, which is composed of a number of individual libraries that evolve on their own timescale. A build framework called jhbuild exists for building and managing the dependencies between these disparate projects.

Once we have a modular build, and an ability to separately download and install third-party modules, we will need to distinguish the maintenance status or certification of modules. The ns-3 project will maintain a set of core ns-3 modules including those essential for all ns-3 simulations, and will maintain a master build file containing metadata to contributed modules; this will allow users to fetch and build what they need. Eventually, modules will have a maintenance state associated with them describing aspects such as who is the maintainer, whether it is actively maintained, whether it contains documentation or tests, whether it passed an ns-3 project code review, whether it is currently passing the tests, etc. The current status of all known ns-3 modules will be maintained in a database and be browsable on the project web site.

The basic idea of the ns-3 app store would be to store on a server a set of user-submitted metadata which describes various source code packages. Typical metadata would include:

• unique name
• version number
• last known good ns-3 version (tested against)
• description
• download url
• untar/unzip command
• configure command
• build command
• system prerequisites (if user needs to apt-get install other libraries)
• list of ns-3 package dependencies (other ns-3 packages which this package depends upon)

Requirements

Build and configuration

• Enable optimized, debug, and static
• Separate tests from models
• Doxygen support
• Test program
• lcov code coverage
• integrate with buildbots

API and work flow

Assume that our new download script is called download.py and our new build script is called build.py.

  wget http://www.nsnam.org/releases/ns-allinone-3.x.tar.bz2
  bunzip2 ns-allinone-3.x.tar.bz2 && tar xvf ns-allinone-3.x.tar.bz2
  cd ns-allinone-3.x

In this directory, users will find the following directory layout:

  build.py download.py constants.py? VERSION LICENSE README

Download essential modules:

  ./download.py

This will leave a layout such as follows:

  download.py build.py pygccxml pybindgen simulator core common gcc-xml

For typical users, the next step is as follows:

  ./build.py ns3

"ns3" is a meta-module that pulls in what constitutes what is considered to be the core of an ns-3 release (i.e. for starters, every module that is in ns-3.9).

The above will take the following steps:

• build all typical prerequisites such as pybindgen
• cd core
• ./waf configure && ./waf && ./waf install

The above will install headers into build/debug/ns3/ and a libns3core.so into build/debug/lib/

  cd ../simulator
  ./waf configure && ./waf && ./waf install
  cd ..
  ...

Open issue: How to express and honor platform limitations, such as only trying to download/build NSC on platforms supporting it.

Once the build process is done, there will be a bunch of libraries in a common build directory, and all applicable headers. Specifically, we envision for module foo, there may be a libns3foo.so, libns3foo-test.so, and possibly others.

At this point, unless python has been disabled, the program executes:

• python-scan.py
• ...
• pybindgen

which operates on the headers in the build/debug/ns3 directory and creates a python module .so library that matches the ns-3 configured components. Open issue: What is the eventual python API? Should each module be imported separately such as import node as ns.node, or should we try to go for a single ns3 python module?

Tests are run by running ./test.py, which knows how to find the available test libraries and run the tests.

Doxygen can be run such as "build.py doxygen" on the build/debug/ns3 directory.

To configure different options such as -g, -fprofile-arcs, e.g., use the CFLAGS environment variable.

To run programs:

  ./build.py shell
  build/debug/examples/csma/csma-bridge

or

  python build/debug/examples/csma/csma-bridge.py

Build all known ns-3 modules:

  ./build.py all

In the above case, suppose that the program could not download and fetch a module. Here, it can interactively prompt the user "Module foo not found; do you wish to continue [Y/n]?".

Build the core of ns-3, plus device models WiFi and CSMA:

  ./build ns3-core wifi csma

ns3-core is a meta-module containing simulator core common node. Open issue: what is the right granularity for this module?

Suppose a research group at Example Univ. publishes a new WiMin device module. It gets a new unique module name from ns-3 project, such as wimin. It also contributes metadata to the master ns-3 build script. When a third-party does the following:

  ./build.py wimin

the system will try to download and build the new wimin module (plus its examples and tests), and put it in the usual place.

Plan

GNOME jhbuild seems to be able to provide most or all of the "build.py" and "download.py" functionality mentioned above. jhbuild may need to be wrapped by a specialized ns-3 build.py or download.py wrapper. So, the current plan is to try to prototype the above using jhbuild and se how far we get

Work can proceed in parallel:

1. Start to try to compare jhbuild with our existing download.py/build.py at the top level directory
2. Try to define the module granularity and fix broken module dependencies
3. Work on python bindings
4. Work on how to handle examples in a modular test framework