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1. An overview
2. Building ns-3
3. Running ns-3
4. Getting access to the ns-3 documentation
5. Working with the development version of ns-3

Note: Much more substantial information about ns-3 can be found athttps://www.nsnam.org

ns-3 is a free open source project aiming to build a discrete-eventnetwork simulator targeted for simulation research and education.This is a collaborative project; we hope thatthe missing pieces of the models we have not yet implementedwill be contributed by the community in an open collaborationprocess.

The process of contributing to the ns-3 project varies withthe people involved, the amount of time they can investand the type of model they want to work on, but the currentprocess that the project tries to follow is described here:https://www.nsnam.org/developers/contributing-code/

This README excerpts some details from a more extensivetutorial that is maintained at:https://www.nsnam.org/documentation/latest/

The code for the framework and the default models providedby ns-3 is built as a set of libraries. User simulationsare expected to be written as simple programs that makeuse of these ns-3 libraries.

To build the set of default libraries and the exampleprograms included in this package, you need to use thetool 'waf'. Detailed information on how to use waf isincluded in the file doc/build.txt

However, the real quick and dirty way to get started is totype the command

./waf configure --enable-examples

followed by

./waf

in the directory which contains this README file. The filesbuilt will be copied in the build/ directory.

The current codebase is expected to build and run on theset of platforms listed in therelease notesfile.

Other platforms may or may not work: we welcome patches toimprove the portability of the code to these other platforms.

On recent Linux systems, once you have built ns-3 (with examplesenabled), it should be easy to run the sample programs with thefollowing command, such as:

./waf --run simple-global-routing

That program should generate asimple-global-routing.tr texttrace file and a set ofsimple-global-routing-xx-xx.pcap binarypcap trace files, which can be read bytcpdump -tt -r filename.pcapThe program source can be found in the examples/routing directory.

Once you have verified that your build of ns-3 works by runningthe simple-point-to-point example as outlined in 3) above, it isquite likely that you will want to get started on readingsome ns-3 documentation.

All of that documentation should always be available fromthe ns-3 website:https://www.nsnam.org/documentation/.

This documentation includes:

• a tutorial

• a reference manual

• models in the ns-3 model library

• a wiki for user-contributed tips:https://www.nsnam.org/wiki/

• API documentation generated using doxygen: this isa reference manual, most likely not very well suitedas introductory text:https://www.nsnam.org/doxygen/index.html

If you want to download and use the development version of ns-3, youneed to use the toolgit. A quick and dirty cheat sheet is includedin the manual, but reading through the gittutorials found in the Internet is usually a good idea if you are notfamiliar with it.

If you have successfully installed git, you can geta copy of the development version with the following command:

git clone https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev.git

However, we recommend to follow the Gitlab guidelines for starters,that includes creating a Gitlab account, forking the ns-3-dev projectunder the new account's name, and then cloning the forked repository.You can find more information in themanual.