The ns-3 Network Simulator Project

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

Technologies
python, c/c++
Topics
research, networking, 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 a 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-3.30 in September 2019). 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 9000 members as of January 2020, averaging roughly 700 posts per month. Our developers' list has over 1500 subscribers, and the code base has a total of 250 authors and around 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), 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.

2020 Program

Successful Projects

Contributor
Bhaskar Kataria
Mentor
Vivek Jain, Mohit Prakash Tahiliani, Ankit Deepak, Tom Henderson
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
SCE AQMs and TCP along with CNQ-CodelAF and LFQ
Phase 1: 1) Add L4S to ns-3 FqCoDel: ECT(1) traffic gets marked at CE_threshold, ECT(0) is marked at the normal CoDel threshold. For now, avoid the...
Contributor
Ananthakrishnan S
Mentor
Joe Dizhi Zhou, Tommaso Pecorella, Zoraze Ali
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
NetDevice up/down consistency and event chain
There is some inconsitency among the working of NetDevices and IP Interfaces. Ideally when a NetDevice changes it state, it should get reflected in...
Contributor
Deepak K
Mentor
Vivek Jain, Mohit Prakash Tahiliani, Ankit Deepak, Viyom Mittal
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
TCP Prague model for ns-3
Scalable congestion controls such as DCTCP improve performance over Reno and Cubic, which perform badly in high-speed networks (because of their slow...
Contributor
Shivamani Patil
Mentor
mishal23, Ankit Deepak, Abhijith, Tom Henderson
Organization
The ns-3 Network Simulator Project
App Store improvements
Project aims to develop a CI/CD server and add necessary updates to ns-3 AppStore to check if apps/modules available in AppStore build and pass test...