GSOC2023Projects

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This page contains 2023 Google Summer of Code project ideas for ns-3. Please note that ns-3 is applying to Google Summer of Code and will learn of acceptance or not on February 22.

About the ns-3 project

ns-3 is a discrete-event network simulator, with a particular emphasis on network research and education.

Users of ns-3 can construct simulations of computer networks using models of traffic generators, protocols such as TCP/IP, and devices and channels such as WiFi, and analyze or visualize the results. Simulation plays a vital role in the research and education process, because of the ability for simulations to obtain reproducible results (particularly for wireless protocol design), scale to large networks, and study systems that have not yet been implemented. A particular emphasis in ns-3 is the high degree of realism in the models (including frameworks for real application and kernel code) and integration of the tool with virtual machine environments and testbeds; we view that researchers need to move more effortlessly between simulation, testbeds, and live experiments, and ns-3 is designed to facilitate that.

ns-3 has participated in past GSoCs during 2008-10, 2012-15, and 2017-22. We seek contributors interested in the intersection of wireless and computer networking, performance analysis, and open source software.

Org admins

Google Summer of Code organizational admins for ns-3 are Tommaso Pecorella, Mohit P. Tahiliani, and Tom Henderson; contact them with any questions. They also hang out on Zulip.

Mentors

Mentors will be paired with contributors based on the projects that are selected. Mentors from companies are welcome, if the employer will permit the mentor sufficient time to perform the mentoring. Prospective mentors should notify Mohit P. Tahiliani or Tommaso Pecorella of interest. Mentors familiar with ns-3 development practices will be preferred, to improve the chances of code merge. In 2022, we are going to be seeking two-person or multiple-person mentoring teams for projects, to help with the mentoring workload and bring more expertise.

The current list of prospective mentors for 2023 can be found among the ideas listed below.

How to apply

For students or contributors interested in applying to ns-3 for GSoC, please go through the following list to get started:

  • Read the official GSoC contributor guide.
  • Read ns-3's GSoC contributor guide
  • Look through our #Project Ideas below to see if you find a project that interests you.
  • Review the tutorial and contributing guide thoroughly, if you have not already done so.
  • Once it is posted, look through the GSoC application template to start preparing your proposal. We will wait to see whether we are actually part of GSoC before posting this.
  • Next, proceed to get in touch with the developers on the mailing list or chat room and refine your proposal.
  • In parallel, make sure you prepare a patch as per the patch requirement guidelines. Your application to ns-3 will not be considered if you do not fulfill this requirement.

Below is a list of #Project Ideas proposed by the ns-3 team for Google Summer of Code 2023. Please note that these ideas are not limited to GSoC; anyone is welcome to work on them. Please email the ns-developers list if you have a different idea that you'd like to work on, to see if a mentor may be interested. Applicants are encouraged to look over this list, pick one that especially interests them, think about it, and discuss potential approaches on the ns-developers list. Previous experience with the Google Summer of Code programs suggest that the more you discuss and refine your proposal on the mailing list beforehand, the stronger the proposal it will develop into, and the higher your chances of being accepted into the program.

Each project idea within a particular priority has been tagged with the following properties:

  • Required Experience: Languages, concepts, or packages with which applicants must be familiar.
  • Bonus Experience: Other experience or familiarity which would be greatly helpful to applicants for this project.
  • Interests: Areas of particular relevance to this project, and an indicator of where successful contributors might apply their experiences coming out of this project.
  • Difficulty: easy, medium or difficult
  • Recommended reading: pointers to documentation, papers, specific bugs, etc.

Note that all of the projects require some experience and comfort with C++. Project ideas for which C++ is noted as a required experience will require more and deeper familiarity with the language. A similar notion applies to computer networking, BSD sockets, etc: Familiarity is strongly preferred, but is not required except where explicitly noted due to the topic being more advanced in that regard. A few projects are more Python-centric.

Patch requirement guidelines

Each project idea has (or will have) a list of proposed tasks that a contributor must do to ensure his/her ability to carry out the idea successfully. Performing one task is necessary for a successful application, and performing more than one task is not necessary.

If a contributor wants to work on a proposed task he/she should immediately contact the mentor(s) to "claim" that task - in order to avoid (where needed) that multiple contributors are on the same task. A task might involve fixing a specific open issue, or adding some functionalities to the existing code.

Contributors that did already contribute to the ns-3 codebase with non-trivial bug fixing or features additions might be exempted from performing a task. If you have doubts about if your contributions made you eligible for the task exemption contact the mentors.

Mentors: how to participate

The ns-3 project is open to the proposal of new project ideas by developers interested in being a GSoC mentor. For mentors who're adding project ideas to the list below, please ensure that:

  • The projects are sized such that there can be a code merge by the end of the coding period. The scope of the project should be such that it is very difficult to *not* have a code merge by the end of the summer.
  • The proposed projects are not too open-ended. That is, if the deliverables or a clear path to the same are not well understood, it is better kept outside GSOC.
  • There should be a clear merge path to one of the main project code repositories (ns-3-dev, ns-3-dce, bake) by the end of the summer, either because the patches directly apply to these repositories, or because they apply to an ns-3 module that is in the process of being merged with ns-3-dev.

Project Ideas

Note to contributors: These ideas are not listed in any priority order. If an idea doesn't have a mentor yet, it means that if you are interested, you should announce your interest and see if there is a mentor who might pick it up.

Medium sized projects (175 hours)

To be added.

Large projects (350 hours)

IPv6 global routing

Mentors: Ameya Deshpande, Tommaso Pecorella.

Creating a complex topology can be a problem, and sometimes the user do not want to be (also) concerned about setting up dynamic routing protocols (e.g., RIP, RIPng). For IPv4, ns-3 provides two alternatives: GlobalRouting, and NixRouting, which just "do the trick" - they simply fill the routing tables in intermediate nodes, GlobalRouting using an approach similar to OSPF, NixRouting by leveraging the "abstract" knowledge of the network. Neither actually use any message between the nodes, so they also reduce the network overhead - something that is useful in many cases.

The problem is that they don't work for IPv6, and that's a huge limitation. The goal of the project is to fix that limitation. Note that the project must cope with different IPv6 address kinds (link-local, global, scoped multicast, etc.). Due to the limitation with GlobalRouting w.r.t. wireless channels, it would be advisable to start working with NixRouting.

The most important point of the implementation should be code duplicate minimization, in order to have the minimize maintenance efforts.

Possible tasks to fulfill the patch requirement:

  • Add a function to print the path that a packet will use (according to Ipv4NixVectorRouting), i.e., given source and destination IP print the IP addresses of the nodes that Ipv4NixVectorRouting will use.
  • Add a function to print the path that a packet will use (according to Ipv4GlobalRouting), i.e., given source and destination IP print the IP addresses of the nodes that Ipv4GlobalRouting will use.
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