[Ns-developers] announcing a new project for ns-3

[Tom Henderson]

I'd like to officially announce a new project, funded by NSF, to develop
a next major version of ns.  We are calling it the ns-3 project, and the
PIs also include Sally Floyd, George Riley, and Sumit Roy.  We also have
a collaboration with the Planete group at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, where 
Mathieu Lacage has been the main developer.

Broadly, the overall goals of ns-3 are to redesign the simulator in the
following areas:
- software architecture
- integration of existing networking software
- updated models
- educational use
and to perform software maintenance.  More details can be found at the
following page:
http://nsnam.isi.edu/nsnam/index.php/Ns-3

The project funding will allow us to staff full-time programmers and to
fund student work on ns.  We will devote some resources to continued
maintenance of ns-2 while we work on developing ns-3.

We intend for the NSF funding to be the seed for a broader open source 
simulation project for the research and educational community.  We 
invite other research groups and individuals to participate in ns-3 
development, review, discussion, and code contribution.  We plan to use 
the ns-developers mailing list for subsequent discussions, so if you're 
interested, please subscribe there.

Tom