Friday, April 29, 2011

NS-3 Summer of Code 2011: Results Announced!

We have selected three students for the NS-3 Summer of Code 2011. The accepted list of projects are listed below:
  • Ashwin Narayan with "Click-MAC extensions for ns-3-click". Mentored by Ruben Merz and Lalith Suresh.
  • Pankaj Gupta with "LTE-RRC extensions". Mentored by Giuseppe Piro and Francesco Capozzi.
  • Atishay Jain with "Ipv6 Global Routing". Mentored by Tom Henderson and Mitch Watrous.
Congratulations to all of you and welcome to the ns-3 community, we look forward to working with you over the summer!

Friday, April 1, 2011

Announcing the NS-3 Summer of Code

We are pleased to announce the NS-3 Summer of Code (NSoC) 2011 programme!

The NSoC is a summer program to bring in student developers into the ns-3 community. Any student (Undergraduate, Masters or PhD) currently registered in an accredited institution is free to apply. Students will be paired with mentors from the ns-3 development team, and will work on focused projects throughout the summer. The main goals of the program are:

  • Attract new student developers who’re eager about contributing and, if they like the experience, will join the project for the long term.
  • Provide students with a good mentoring programme, allow them to be a part of the ns-3 development process, and help them pick up knowledge and skills that would be helpful in their future careers.

Unlike Google Summer of Code, NSoC is not a paid summer position, and neither students nor mentors will be paid. Students who successfully complete the project will receive recognition on the ns-3 web site, and a commemorative shirt. Mentors will be recognized as well.

At most three students will be selected for this programme. So students, what are you waiting for? Look through the ideas page (link given below) and start working on your applications as soon as possible!

The timeline for the programme is as follows:

April 5th - April 15th: Students apply for NSoC with project proposals.
April 15th - April 30th: NS-3 developers review project proposals.
May 1st: Results announced.
May 2nd - May 22nd: Community Interaction/Introductions.
May 23rd: Coding Period.
July 11th - July 15th: Mid Term Code Review + feedback.
August 15th - August 19th: End Term Code Review + feedback.


Important links:

NSoC page
Project Ideas page
Student application template

Friday, January 7, 2011

ns-3.10 has been released and is available from the releases directory. Some significant additions/changes to ns-3 are as follows:
  • the PyViz visualizer has been merged to the main tree
  • a new TCP implementation for IPv4, including default support for TCP NewReno congestion control
  • a bulk file transfer application
  • DSDV routing for IPv4
  • support for IEEE 802.11g
  • the initial set of models for 3GPP LTE (from GSOC 2010)
  • energy support for the UAN module and a Li-Ion energy model (from GSOC 2010)
  • migration of the trace-based regression tests to the new test framework
  • reorganisation of the high MAC of the 802.11 model
  • support for modeling energy consumption in WiFi devices
  • conversion of project documentation to Sphinx
For a more complete changelog, please look at the full RELEASE_NOTES.

Thanks to Tom Henderson and Josh Pelkey for serving as release managers. And to all our community members, keep the contributions flowing!

Sunday, October 3, 2010

2010 Google Summer of Code Wrapup

We had a very productive GSOC this year with all four of our students passing and creating useful extensions to ns-3. I'd like to thank everyone who made it a success again, including our organization admin Alina Quereilhac, our mentors, everyone who helped during the selection and code review process, and of course our four students. Alina did an outstanding job, taking care of a lot of administrative details, making sure deadlines were met, and even designing the recruitment flyer. Alina also created an informative wiki page at the end of the process to help future admins:
http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/index.php/GSOC2010OAReport

I asked each of our mentors to write a brief summary of each student's contribution, which I'll now list below.

Blake Hurd, mentored by Josh Pelkey, contributed an OpenFlow interface and supporting code to enable ns-3 simulations to use OpenFlow switches. Briefly, the OpenFlow standard allows the path of a flow of data to be determined by a software controller. By implemening the OpenFlow API, a switch can allow researchers to experiment with different routing or quality of service methods without exposing the internal, often proprietary, parts of the switch. For this reason, the OpenFlow standard has been adopted by several major switch vendors, and OpenFlow enabled switches have been deployed in several research university campus networks. The ns-3-openflow code allows researchers to experiment with OpenFlow through simulation using the discrete event network simulator, ns-3. This is particularly useful to researchers without direct access to a large physical network with OpenFlow capabilties. Through ns-3-openflow, Blake has provided an excellent addition to ns-3! You can look forward to this functionality in ns-3.10. (Josh Pelkey)

Giuseppe Piro, mentored by Nicola Baldo and Marco Miozzo, developed a model for 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) devices. LTE is an upcoming wireless technology already widely endorsed among mobile operators and manufacturers. For this reason, there is an emerging need for tools that allow the simulation of LTE; in particular, open source network simulation tools - not available before the start of this project - would be highly valued by the research community. As part of his GSoC project, Giuseppe developed channel, PHY and MAC models for the radio interface of LTE (known as E-UTRA). Overall, Giuseppe's put in a big effort, designing and writing a huge amount of code, and giving ns-3 developers a hard time to review it all. LTE is a very complex standard, and for this reason at this time (end of GSoC 2010) it is not possible yet to simulate a complete LTE system. Still, Giuseppe's contribution is fundamental in that it set the basis for developing such a complete tool. Since the start of this project there has been an increasing interest in this LTE modeling effort, which we hope will ultimately result in more users and developers joining the ns-3 community. (Nicola Baldo)

Andrea Sacco, mentored by Leonard Tracy, contributed extensions to the underwater acoustic networking (UAN) module recently introduced to ns-3. Andrea worked to add support to the UAN module for modeling autonomous underwater vehicles and energy usage by underwater nodes. Underwater acoustic communications is a challenging field of research which is heavily reliant on simulations (due to financial and logistical reasons). A publicly available simulator with accurate and reliable models should prove to be a very useful tool to the community. Andrea worked with several teams to successfully incorporate other code contributions in the library and provided extensions to other modules to ensure interoperability and thus extend the abilities of the UAN module. He also took it upon himself to research tangential fields in order to ensure the most accurate possible models in the UAN module. His work and motivation has gone far to make the ns3 UAN module a useful tool to the academic community. (Leonard Tracy)

Finally, the contribution of Lalith Suresh, mentored by Ruben Merz, allows ns-3 users to use the Click Modular Router along with ns-3. ns-3 users can implement a router using Click and then use ns-3 to evaluate and simulate its functioning on any topology ns-3 can build. This feature was available in ns-2. However, Lalith's work is more than a port. His work during the GSOC program is a complete rewrite that takes full advantage of ns-3. Users can use any traffic source and any transport layer, CSMA, point-to-point and WiFi. Finally, different Click configurations can be loaded at different nodes. Lalith's code is currently under review for submission to inclusion in an upcoming ns-3 release and we hope that Lalith will keep on working on ns-3, so that the project can further benefit from his talent and quality work. (Ruben Merz)

Our work is not completely done yet; we now have to complete the code reviews from the projects and get them merged, so help in reviewing will be appreciated. We will try to get most of this code merged during the current release cycle for ns-3.10. In closing, I'd like to express thanks to Google; Google Summer of Code has been generous to the ns-3 project for the past three years and this year upped our student allocation to four students. I'm hoping that we can sustain this year's success and participate again next year (the program will start up again in less than half a year).

Friday, August 20, 2010

ns-3.9 Released

ns-3.9 has been released and is available from the releases directory:

A short list of new features is shown below:
  • a new OFDM error rate model for WiFi based on an underlying NIST model
  • a new mobility trace reader for reading ns-2, BonnMotion, SUMO, and TraNS mobility trace files
  • an energy model for nodes and devices, including an energy source model and device energy models
  • Rocketfuel topology dataset support for the Rocketfuel ISP topology mapping engine
  • an underwater acoustic network (UAN) model
For a more complete changelog, please look at the full RELEASE_NOTES:

Thanks to Josh Pelkey for serving as release manager, and for the usual strong support from maintainers and contributors.

Monday, May 3, 2010

ns-3.8 Released

ns-3.8 has been released and is immediately available for download here.

A plethora of new features have been included with this release. They are listed below:
  1. WiMAX Net Device:
    Allow to simulate IEEE 802.16 point to multi-point based networks.

  2. MPI Based Parallelization:
    Distributed simulation for point-to-point networks using the MPI standard.

  3. Matrix Propagation Loss Model:
    This model uses a two-dimensional matrix of path loss, indexed by source and destination nodes.

  4. Topology Read System:
    Allows quick and easy creation of large topologies by reading Inet or Orbis files.

  5. Gauss-Markov Mobility Model:
    Adds 3-D adaptation of Gauss-Markov mobility model which has both memory and variability.

  6. Steady-state Random Waypoint Mobility Model:
    Based on random waypoint mobility (RWM) model for cases when speed, pause and position are uniformly distributed random variables. However, initial values of these parameters are not from uniform distribution, but from a stationary distribution of RWM model.

  7. Two-ray Ground Propagation Loss Model:
    Calculates the crossover distance under which Friis is used. The antenna height is set to the node's z-coordinate, but can be added to using the model parameter SetHeightAboveZ, which will affect *all* stations.
A long list of bug fixes have also been included with this release. A complete list is available here.

The tentative date of release for the next version, ns-3.9, is August 5th.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Accepted Google Summer of Code 2010 Projects

NS-3 has four accepted projects at this year's Google Summer of Code. They are as follows:

- Andrea Sacco
with "UAN Framework", mentored by Leonard Tracy.

- Blake Hurd
with "ns-3-OpenFlow", mentored by Josh Pelkey.

- Giuseppe Piro
with "MAC and PHY models for LTE", mentored by Nicola Baldo.

- Lalith Suresh
with "NS-3 Click Modular Router Integration", mentored by Ruben Merz.

Please visit the nsnam GSoC 2010 page for descriptions of the projects, links to the project repositories and their respective wikis.