Roadmap

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This page is a brief summary of current development activities for ns-3. If you want to participate in any stages of the below development activities, please email the contacts listed below, or the ns-developers list.


Release process

ns-3 releases are based on date-driven schedules: rather than target a set of features for a specific version number, we aim instead for a release date and ship whatever is ready by that date. If a cool new feature misses that date, it is not a big deal because the next release is never too far away. Because the project is currently still under some heavy flux where a lot of APIs still change, the current interval between releases is expected to be roughly one month. We expect that interval to increase to 3 or 4 months once the core of the simulator has stabilized sufficiently.

The roadmap below is tentative. That is, the goal is to document what we would like to see in a number of releases, but, of course, since this is an Open Source project, contributors are free to work on anything they are interested in and try to merge it in earlier than stated. If we feel a specific feature targeted to a specific release just won't make it in time, we will move that feature to the next release.

Some of the items in this roadmap do not have anyone signed up to get work done on them. So, there is something you are interested in, ask on ns-developers.

Detailed steps for doing the source code release are found in the doc/release_steps.txt file in the ns-3-dev repository.

Deadlines

There are a few deadlines and steps for incorporating code into a scheduled ns-3 release:

  • Mar 15. (15 days prior) deadline for posting any patches or private repos that are solicited for review/comment, for possible check in to the upcoming release. These are for patches or repos that can be considered as extensions to the simulator. Post a summary to the list, allow 7 days (minimum) for comments, and if all comments and issues can be resolved in that time window, it can go into the next release; otherwise it slides until when things are resolved.
  • Mar 24 (7 days prior) deadline for being in a "ready-to-merge" state, which means that there is agreement that comments from the previous stage have been resolved and that the change can go in. Perhaps a "last-call" announcement by the release manager on the list will help.
  • Mar 28 (3 days prior) deadline for merging any extensions or new modules that change the API, or any miscellaneous changes by maintainers. Exceptions: critical bug fixes, doxygen and documentation, and coding style alignment nits.

Finally, it is good practice to announce among the active committers when you are doing a major merge, to avoid bad merge collisions.

Release schedule

ns-3 is still in a pre-alpha state, with monthly development releases. Releases are occurring on the 15th of each month, and are source releases only.

March 31, 2008 (ns-3.0.12)

The following items are candidates for merge into the next release, although merge is dependent on resolving outstanding comments during the release process.

  1. ns-3 Object attribute system
  2. multitasking TCP server
    • status: already merged

Code proposals under review or development

This section is intended to summarize code proposals under active discussion on the mailing list.

In general, ns-3 is trying to finalize the API including final revisions to the object model, to the default value system, and to higher-level topology/scenario code.

The following repositories are being actively worked on:

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

Future releases

The following are additional things that various developers are working on, plan to work on, or have brought to a prototype state. (Please keep this brief and add pointers to other pages if there is a lengthy description).

Topologies

Support for helper objects and scripting design patterns to build larger simulation topologies.

Python bindings

Note: we are moving forward with Gustavo's 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:

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

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