[Ns-developers] ns-3: dev plan

[Tom Henderson]

Kevin Fall wrote:
> could somebody point me to the thinking on how your topology objects 
> might work?
> 
> thx,
> - K

George Riley is working on that aspect, and I think he intends to bring 
forward some concepts developed in his GTNetS simulator, but there is no 
checked in code at the moment.

The basic idea is that a topology object defines how nodes and channels 
are interconnected and perhaps addressed; it is like a helper function 
or object that avoids the need for the user to write out the low-level 
config of all of the components.  "DuplexLink" might be one example used 
heavily in ns-2.  Another is a "dumbbell" topology from GTNetS, such as:

// Use the Dumbbell stock topology object to create the desired topology
// In this example, we specify 10 nodes on left side, 10 nodes on right
// side, and a bottleneck bandwidth restriction of 0.5.
// The ip addresses on the left and right side are as given below.
Dumbbell b(10, 10, 0.5, IPAddr4("192.168.1.1"), IPAddr4("192.168.2.1"));

The node and channel types that are used in building this topology can 
be provided to the topology via some means, such as cloning a node 
object configured prior to calling the topology creation.

Tom