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This page supplements the main project roadmap page with more detail. If you want to participate in any early stages of the below development activities, please email the contacts listed below. Otherwise, later stages of the development will be posted to ns-developers mailing list for review and comment.

Release 3.0.5 (August 15, 2007)

Statistics

George Riley(riley@ece.gatech.edu) and Mathieu Lacage (mathieu.lacage@sophia.inria.fr) are the contacts for this development.

One of the important design goals of the ns-3 tracing framework was to allow users to hook their own online statistic analysis code into trace hooks to avoid having to spew gigabytes of trace files only to post-process them later.

We thus need a framework to make it easy and safe for users to calculate basic network-specific values in the system such as:

• RTT
• Throughput
• inter-arrival time
• ...

Furthermore, it should be trivial to efficiently calculate basic statistical properties on these collected measurements:

• Average with standard deviation. Arbitrary confidence interval ?
• Cumulative distribution of a variable. i.e., the EDCF.
• ...

A serious Statistics project should thus first refine the list of variables we want to measure. It should also attempt to define as precisely as possible the type of statistical tools which should be made available for these variable measurements or other types of measurements.

Once this initial discussion has take place, we should be able to design an API for these features and implement it for a specific ns-3 release. If you believe that you can contribute useful input to this discussion, do not hesitate to join ns-developers to talk about it.

802.11 MAC and PHY code ported from ns-3-yans

Mathieu Lacage (mathieu.lacage@sophia.inria.fr) is leading this port from ns-3-yans.

Global, static routing

The software architecture document has a routing roadmap. For July, we hope to enable static point-to-point routing.

Python bindings

Gustavo Carneiro (gjcarneiro@gmail.com) and Craig Dowell (craigdo@ee.washington.edu) are working on the architecture and implementation for adding Python bindings to ns-3.

The goal is to allow full or nearly-full access to the C++ APIs from Python, and to allow components to be created in Python as well. Initially, we will try to wrap the higher-level C++ API.

The following options are being considered:

• Py++ (boost::python): This seems to be difficult to extend and provides cryptic compilation error messages
• SWIG: functionally similar to boost::python but supports more languages; also may be difficult to extend
• PyBus: Python LHC Computing Grid Dictionary). This is a home-brew solution for the LHC Computing Grid project based on GCC-XML (http://seal.web.cern.ch/seal/) to read LGCDict info that adds reflection to C++.
• an IDispatch-like technique, such as in PythonCOM (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/)

Here are more details from Gustavo's blog

Ethernet: CSMA/CD

Emmanuelle Laprise (emmanuelle.laprise@bluekazoo.ca) and George Riley (riley@ece.gatech.edu) are working on an Ethernet NetDevice and Ethernet bridge node.

Release 3.0.6 (September 15, 2007)

TCP

Raj Bhattacharjea (raj.b@gatech.edu) is working on a port of the GTNetS TCP module to ns-3.

Traffic generation applications

George Riley (riley@ece.gatech.edu) is overseeing the porting of application models from GTNetS to ns-3.

802.11 PHY cleanup

Mathieu Lacage (mathieu.lacage@sophia.inria.fr) is working on 802.11 PHY cleanup to simplify addition of other 802.11 PHY models.

Wireless routing protocol infrastructure

Wireless routing protocol infrastructure for mobile wireless networks. Contact: Mathieu Lacage (mathieu.lacage@sophia.inria.fr)