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).

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