The ns-3 Network Simulator

NS-3 Summer of Code 2011: Results Announced!

2011-04-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

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!

Announcing the NS-3 Summer of Code

2011-04-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

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

2011-01-07T04:34:00.000-08:00

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!

2010 Google Summer of Code Wrapup

2010-10-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

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).

ns-3.9 Released

2010-08-20T20:08:00.000-07:00

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.

ns-3.8 Released

2010-05-03T01:41:00.000-07:00

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:

WiMAX Net Device:
Allow to simulate IEEE 802.16 point to multi-point based networks.
MPI Based Parallelization:
Distributed simulation for point-to-point networks using the MPI standard.
Matrix Propagation Loss Model:
This model uses a two-dimensional matrix of path loss, indexed by source and destination nodes.
Topology Read System:
Allows quick and easy creation of large topologies by reading Inet or Orbis files.
Gauss-Markov Mobility Model:
Adds 3-D adaptation of Gauss-Markov mobility model which has both memory and variability.
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.
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.

Accepted Google Summer of Code 2010 Projects

2010-04-28T03:28:00.000-07:00

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.

2009 Google Summer of Code Wrapup

2009-10-04T23:11:00.000-07:00

We had a successful GSOC with all three of our students making nice
contributions to ns-3. I would like to thank all of our students and
mentors, and also Joe Kopena who served as Organizational Admin (OA) and
helped a lot during the selection process. I also would like to
recognize additional mentor volunteers who helped during the selection
process (Nicola Baldo, Marcello Caleffi, and Florian Westphal); we
simply did not have enough spots to take all of the students and mentors
that we would have liked.

Qasim Javed, mentored by Adrian Sai-wah Tam, has contributed Network
Address Translation (NAT) for IPv4. NATs are an important model due to
their pervasive deployment. To implement NAT, however, requires
connection tracking state, and Qasim approached the problem by building
a general framework patterned after Linux Netfilter that can be reused
in the future for things such as firewall rulesets. He then
implemented connection tracking (data structures for maintaining state
about connections) and used the connection tracking API to implement
NAT. At the end of the project, Qasim demonstrated NAT working within
this framework. There remains some integration work before merging to
ns-3-dev, but this code when merged will be a big step forward.

Flavio Kubota, mentored by Juliana Freitag Borin, contributed an uplink
scheduler for WiMAX. WiMAX is a model of great interest to network
simulation, and Flavio was able to complete his primary goal of porting
and validating the uplink scheduler from ns-2 model of the Computer
Networks Laboratory at the Univeristy of Campinas. These extensions are
necessary to model QoS provision on the uplink. Flavio followed through
on the merging of his model to ns-3's WiMAX repository which is being
prepared for our ns-3.7 release.

Duy Nguyen, mentored by Ruben Merz, contributed a new rate control
algorithm for 802.11. Called Minstrel, this rate control is based on a
probing mechanism that seeks to gather statistics about different rates
in the network and apply heuristics to determine the best observed rate.
This approach has been shown to often outperform traditional rate
controls that are based on estimating received signal strength, because
signal strength is only one variable (among channel multipath and
interference) that affects reception probability. Duy's implementation
has already been merged to ns-3-dev, and I'm happy to see his continued
active participation on our users' mailing list.

All of our GSOC work has been archived on the wiki and at our
organizational page here:
http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/ns3

In summary, GSOC once again was a great experience for our project and
hopefully for the individuals involved, and we are grateful to Google
for selecting us again this year.

ns-3.5.1 released

2009-09-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

ns-3.5.1 has been released and is immediately available at http://www.nsnam.org/releases/ns-allinone-3.5.1.tar.bz2.

This is a bugfix-only release:

Bug 628: Virtual Net Device's DoDispose doesn't clean up properly
Bug 632: fix bug preventing the sending of packets to a local IP
emu device shouldn't be adding an FCS
Bug 627: Jakes Propagation Loss Model doesn't properly calculate signal loss
Bug 625: Wrong calculation of GetAccessGrantStart in DcfManager.
Bug 381: Wifi crashes on shutdown
Fix first.py example
Bug 642: allow multiple InternetStackHelpers to be instantiated
Implement UdpSocketImpl::Close ()
bug 650: PacketSocket::Close()
Reorder the #includes in ns3module_helpers.cc to solve Fedora 11 compilation error
Bug 639: Buffer::CopyData is buggy.
Bug 654: avoid segfault with ConfigStore loading
Fixed erroneous first return of Normal Variable
Bug 661: Fixed WifiMacHeader Print Control Characters
Bug 643: Interference Helper does not account properly for simultaneous events
Require nsc 0.5.1

CFP: ROADS Workshop

2009-04-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

In conjunction with ACM SOSP, a one-day workshop on Real Overlays and Distributed Systems (ROADS) will be held on October 14, 2009, in Big Sky MT. From the CFP:

"For this workshop we especially welcome papers that explore the interaction between simulation (e.g., ModelNet or ns-3), emulation (e.g., Emulab), and more realistic deployment settings (e.g., PlanetLab) to better predict performance or architectural bottlenecks when scaling up a distributed service on experimental environments."

Submissions due June 15, 2009
Acceptance notification July 20, 2009
Camera-ready version August 14, 2009
Workshop date October 14, 2009

More details are here.

CFP: NSTOOLS 2009

2009-04-06T21:20:00.000-07:00

The Network Simulation Tools Workshop (NSTools) is a one-day event held in conjunction with the Fourth International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools (VALUETOOLS'09), which will be held in Pisa, Italy, on October 19, 2009.

Full Papers due: June 10, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: July 10, 2009
Camera-ready Manuscripts due: July 25, 2009
Conference Date: October 19, 2009

See this posting for more details.

ns-3.4 released

2009-04-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

ns-3.4 has been released and is immediately available at http://www.nsnam.org/releases/ns-allinone-3.4.tar.bz2.

New user-visible features
-------------------------
a) Wifi models: Timo Bingman contributed a ThreeLogDistance and a Nakagami propagation loss model based on the ns-2 models. Fabian Mauchle contributed multicast support.

b) Object Name Service: A facility allowing ns-3 Objects to be assigned names has been added.

c) Tap Bridge: A second option for integrating ns-3 with real-world hosts has been added. This allows for real hosts to talk over ns-3 net devices and simulated networks.

d) A new build option (ns-3-allinone) has been provided to make it easier for users to download and bulid commonly used ns-3 configurations.

e) The ns-2 calendar queue scheduler has been ported to ns-3.

f) XML support has been added to the ConfigStore.

ns-3.3 released

2008-12-28T23:29:00.000-08:00

The latest release of ns-3 (ns-3.2) has been released. New user-visible features:

Emulated Net Device: A new net device has been added as enabling technology for ns-3 emulation scenarios. See src/devices/emu and examples/emu-udp-echo.cc for details.

ICMP Support: Support for several ICMP messages has been added to ns-3. See src/internet-stack/icmpv4.h for details.

IPv6 Address Support: New clases to support IPv6 addresses has been added to the system. This is enabling technology for fuller IPv6 support scheduled for ns-3.4.

flow id: A flow-id tag has been added to the contributed code section

Star topologies: can be created from the topology helper functions

Global routing: The global routing code has been made dynamic (not just limited to pre-simulation computation) and supports stub network interfaces and bridge net devices

Configuration:A MatchContainer has been added to the configuration subsystem

ns-3.2 released

2008-09-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

The latest stable release of ns-3 (ns-3.2) is now available.

New user-visible features:

Learning bridge (IEEE 802.1D): it is now possible to bridge together multiple layer 2 devices to create larger layer 2 networks. The Wifi and Csma models support this new mode of operation. (contributed by Gustavo Carneiro)

Python bindings: it is now possible to write simulation scripts in python using our python bindings (contributed by Gustavo Carneiro).

Real-time simulator: it is now possible to run simulations synchronized on the real-world wall-clock time (contributed by Craig Dowell).

Network Simulation Cradle: it is now possible to use the Network Simulation Cradle (http://www.wand.net.nz/~stj2/nsc) in ns-3 and run simulations using various versions of kernel TCP network stacks. (contributed by Florian Westphal as part of his Google Summer of Code work)

A statistics framework: Joseph Kopena contributed a statistics framework which can be used keep track of simulation data in persistent storage across multiple runs (database and ascii file backends are available). More information on the wiki.

A blog to talk about ns-3

2008-09-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

Blogs are all the rage these days so, we needed one.