The ns-3 Network Simulator Project

ns-3 is a packet-level network simulator for research and education.

Technologies
python, c/c++
Topics
networking, research and development, network simulation
ns-3 is a packet-level network simulator for research and education.

Are you interested in contributing to a widely-used performance evaluation tool for computer networking research? ns-3 is a discrete-event, packet-level network simulator with an emphasis on networking research and education. Users of ns-3 can construct simulations of computer networks using models of traffic generators, protocols such as TCP/IP, and devices and channels such as Wi-Fi and LTE, and analyze or visualize the results. Simulation plays a vital role in the research and education process, because of the ability for simulations to obtain reproducible results (particularly for wireless protocol design), scale to large networks, and study systems that have not yet been implemented. A particular emphasis in ns-3 is the high degree of realism in the models (including frameworks for using real application and kernel code) and integration of the tool with virtual machine environments and testbeds. Very large scale simulations are possible; simulations of hundreds of millions of nodes have been published. ns-3 has been in development since 2005 and has been making regular releases since June 2008 (our last release was ns-3.27 in October 2017). The tool is in wide use; we provide statistics about the project on our web site (under the Overview/Statistics page), but in summary, we have a users mailing list (Google Groups forum) of over 8000 members as of January 2018, averaging roughly 700 posts per month. Our developers' list has over 1500 subscribers, and the code base credits 220 authors, supported by about 10 active maintainers. ns-3 is operated as an open source project, originally funded with financial backing from three NSF grants and from the French government (and via help from Google Summer of Code and ESA Summer of Code in Space), but with most current contributions coming from interested researchers and students worldwide. We use a GPLv2 licensing model and heavily use mailing lists, and chat for code springs, but typically not other social media.

2018 Program

Successful Projects

Contributor
muh.iqbal.cr
Mentor
Tom Henderson
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
Merging and Improvement of LTE and Wi-Fi Coexistence Module
The LTE and Wi-Fi Coexistence module has been quite popular with ns-3 users. But currently, it is detached from the upstream ns-3-dev and missing...
Contributor
WenYing Dai
Mentor
Mohit P. Tahiliani, Dizhi Zhou
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
Implementation of AccECN and ECN++ in ns-3
Reducing Internet Transport Latency is an interesting research topic and has gained significant attention in the recent past. Some of the promising...
Contributor
Davide Magrin
Mentor
Dizhi Zhou
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
A simulation execution manager for ns-3
The envisioned solution consists in the creation of a python library that can start, manage and collect results from multiple simulation runs. In...
Contributor
Jude
Mentor
Tommaso Pecorella
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
Trust-based routing protocols framework
ns-3 contains different routing modules, both for IPv4 and for IPv6. None of them is trust-based. Given the increasing interest on trust-based...
Contributor
Sourabh Jain
Mentor
matthieu, Nat
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
Direct Code Execution upgrade
Direct Code Execution is a framework for ns-3. It allows the users to execute Linux kernel and Linux userspace networking applications inside ns-3...