The Network Simulator, Version 3
--------------------------------1) An overview 2) Building ns-3 3) Running ns-3 4) Getting access to the ns-3 documentation 5) Working with the development version of ns-3
Note: Much more substantial information about ns-3 can be found at http://www.nsnam.org
ns-3 is a free open source project aiming to build a discrete-event
network simulator targeted for simulation research and education.
This is a collaborative project; we hope that
the missing pieces of the models we have not yet implemented
will be contributed by the community in an open collaboration
process.
The process of contributing to the ns-3 project varies with the people involved, the amount of time they can invest and the type of model they want to work on, but the current process that the project tries to follow is described here: http://www.nsnam.org/developers/contributing-code/
This README excerpts some details from a more extensive tutorial that is maintained at: http://www.nsnam.org/documentation/latest/
The code for the framework and the default models provided by ns-3 is built as a set of libraries. User simulations are expected to be written as simple programs that make use of these ns-3 libraries.
To build the set of default libraries and the example programs included in this package, you need to use the tool 'waf'. Detailed information on how to use waf is included in the file doc/build.txt
However, the real quick and dirty way to get started is to type the command ./waf configure --enable-examples followed by ./waf in the the directory which contains this README file. The files built will be copied in the build/ directory.
The current codebase is expected to build and run on the set of platforms listed in the RELEASE_NOTES file.
Other platforms may or may not work: we welcome patches to improve the portability of the code to these other platforms.
On recent Linux systems, once you have built ns-3 (with examples enabled), it should be easy to run the sample programs with the following command, such as:
./waf --run simple-global-routing
That program should generate a simple-global-routing.tr text trace file and a set of simple-global-routing-xx-xx.pcap binary pcap trace files, which can be read by tcpdump -tt -r filename.pcap The program source can be found in the examples/routing directory.
Once you have verified that your build of ns-3 works by running the simple-point-to-point example as outlined in 3) above, it is quite likely that you will want to get started on reading some ns-3 documentation.
All of that documentation should always be available from the ns-3 website: http:://www.nsnam.org/documentation/.
This documentation includes:
a tutorial
a reference manual
models in the ns-3 model library
a wiki for user-contributed tips: http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/
API documentation generated using doxygen: this is a reference manual, most likely not very well suited as introductory text: http://www.nsnam.org/doxygen/index.html
If you want to download and use the development version of ns-3, you need to use the tool 'mercurial'. A quick and dirty cheat sheet is included in doc/mercurial.txt but reading through the mercurial tutorials included on the mercurial website is usually a good idea if you are not familiar with it.
If you have successfully installed mercurial, you can get a copy of the development version with the following command: "hg clone http://code.nsnam.org/ns-3-dev"