Current Development

Main Page - Roadmap - Summer Projects - Project Ideas - Developer FAQ - Tools - Related Projects

HOWTOs - Installation - Troubleshooting - User FAQ - Samples - Models - Education - Contributed Code - Papers

On this page, we will try to maintain pointers to current ns-3 development work, and post some suggested project ideas.

If you are interested in collaborating on one of these projects, please do not hesitate to contact the individuals identified.

Current Development Projects

ns-3 Python bindings

• summary: Python bindings for the ns-3 API, to enable Python scripting
• ns-developers post: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2008-January/003608.html
• code location: http://code.nsnam.org/gjc/pybindgen-notracing
• status: Awaiting stabilization of the APIs before finalizing; probably a May or June merge.
• Here are more details from Gustavo's blog
• Build Instructions

ns-3 Emulation and Realtime Scheduler

In this context emulation means the ability to arange for the simulator to generate and consume data from the network in real time. There are two main pieces to this effort: a realtime simulator scheduler and prototypical net devices that allow connection to real system hardware.

Emulation and Realtime Scheduler has details.

• summary: Add support for various forms of emulation
• ns-developers post: none yet
• code location: http://code.nsnam.org/craigdo/ns-3-emu
• status: Working on emulation code (libnet and pcap integration) and user-space threads

Synchronous posix/sockets API

• summary: Add support for various forms of emulation
• ns-developers post: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2008-April/003912.html
• code location: http://code.nsnam.org/mathieu/ns-3-simu
• status: Under list discussion

Network Simulation Cradle Integration

Florian Westphal is working on this Google Summer of Code Project for 2008.

• summary: Allow use of real-world network stacks in simulations
• status: Full-Time work starts June 1st.

Network Simulation Cradle Integration has details and will be updated as work progresses.

Visualization for ns-3

Jeremy Norman and the iNSpect team have posted some plans for a visualization library for ns-3: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2008-March/003777.html

Suggested Projects

2008 Google Summer of Code Project Ideas

We have posted some project ideas for Google Summer of Code. If you are looking for specific instructions on ns-3 GSOC proposals, please see this page. Here are some more links that provide more details about each topic, to help you with your proposal:

• Performance Evaluation and Optimization
• Linux Kernel Network Stack Integration
• Parallel Simulations Note: Hagen Paul Pfeifer is working on this for 2008
• GUI Development
• Real World Application Integration Note: Liu Jian is working on this for 2008
• Statistical Framework for Network Simulation

Event Scheduler

• Implement a "Calendar Queue" event scheduler. The reference paper is: Randy Brown, Calendar Queues: A Fast 0(1) Priority Queue Implementation for the Simulation Event Set Problem, CACM, 31(10):1220-1227, October 1988.

• Implement a "Dynamic Calendar Queue" event scheduler. The reference paper is: JongSuk Ahn, SeungHyun Oh, "Dynamic Calendar Queue," ss, p. 20, Thirty-Second Annual Simulation Symposium, 1999.

Ns3 Wireless PHY

This project aims at building a high-quality set of PHY-level models for wireless networks: Ns3WirelessPhy

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.

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)

Removing traffic generation from applications class

1. • summary: Proposed decoupling to generalize applications
   • ns-developers post: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2007-July/003136.html
   • code location: http://code.nsnam.org/laprisee/ns-3-mp/
   • status: Was under discussion in the summer.