Ns-3 Tutorial

Background

The ns-2 simulator has been a popular simulator for research and education on Internet systems, especially including mobile, wireless systems. ns-2 enjoys widespread use in the research community; the simulation code has been contributed by over one hundred individuals and organizations, and use of the simulator is consistently referenced in many networking research papers.

A NSF-funded project started in 2006 is developing a next-generation simulator to replace ns-2. The NSF PIs of the project are Tom Henderson and Sumit Roy at the University of Washington, George Riley at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Sally Floyd at the ICSI Center for Internet Research in Berkeley, CA. The NSF team is in the process of setting up a formal association with Walid Dabbous and INRIA's Planete' research group, and INRIA's Mathieu Lacage has been serving as the software lead on the project. ns-3 is a free, open-source software project that aims to include contributions and extensions from the research and educational community at large.

ns-3 is different from ns-2 in several ways, including:

• a refactored software core to improve scalability and extensibility, including support for distributed simulations,
• an architecture to support the incorporation of more open-source networking software such as virtual machines, protocol stacks, routing daemons, and packet trace analyzers,
• completely new wireless models for IEEE 802.11, and eventually other models such as IEEE 802.16,
• a revamped network emulation capability, and
• a revised tracing and statistics gathering framework.

ns-3 is early in its development cycle, before even an alpha release, but we anticipate that by the time of the SIMUTools 2008 conference we will have alpha or beta releases that allow users to conduct mobile, wireless, 802.11-based simulations of the sort frequently conducted using ns-2 in Mobicom and Mobihoc papers.

Therefore, the authors think that a tutorial at SIMUTools will be mutually beneficial to both attendees and the ns-3 project. A goal of the ns-3 project is to develop a simulator allowing for early adopters to consider moving from ns-2 to ns-3 for their 2008 conference submissions; this tutorial could facilitate interactions to help such early adopters.

Tutorial Outline

We plan a half day (four hour), hands-on tutorial to allow interested potential users to find out more about ns-3. A suggested outline (subject to change) might be:

• Introduction: What's new with ns-3?
• ns-3 architecture overview
• Walkthrough of the main differences between ns-2 and ns-3
• Extending ns-3
• Transitioning from ns-2 to ns-3
• Walk-throughs of example simulations
• (Invited brief talks) What are people doing with ns-3?
• Attendee feedback and discussion

The tutorial will be hands-on; users will be provided with software to install on their laptops and a printed tutorial guide. The tutorial will involve a mix of instructor presentation and experiments with examples.

Intended Audience

Researchers and students interested in learning about ns-3 and trying out the new simulator. A basic understanding of mobile computer networks and simulations is expected.

Biographies of Instructors

The instructors will be assembled from the present development team of ns-3, and selected at a later date. Invited talks will also be encouraged.