[Ns-developers] tracing requirements

[mathieu lacage]

hi tom,

I have taken a stab at implementing some low-level code to make all of
these requirements possible. The current code allows you to define
multiple trace sources, connect an arbitrary number of trace sinks to
each trace source. The current code does not attempt to provide the
final solution where all you have to do is just specify a trace file.
Instead, it deals with the problem of getting the trace events, and
collecting them all in one place with enough information to generate the
proper trace file. Sample code demonstrates how the actual trace file
generation could be done based on the tracing information.

I have pushed all this code in
http://code.nsnam.org/mathieu/ns-3-tracing

I have modified the two default sample programs
samples/main-serial-net-device-if.cc and samples/ns-2/simple.tcl.cc to
use this framework to generate some simplistic trace files. If you want
to see what needs to be done in a model, you can look in
src/node/queue.cc Queue::CreateTraceResolver.

Furthermore, I have pushed extensive doxygen documentation on both the
high-level design and the detailed API. I have attached to this email
the main documentation file but anyone should be able to re-generate the
doxygen doc with the "scons doc" command and should be able to browse
the tracing section (see doc/html/group__tracing.html after doxygen
generation)

The current code allows you to trace all queue events in SerialNetDevice
objects, all ipv4 tx, rx, and drop events. Many more could be added but
I did not bother adding tracing support everywhere for now. It did not
seem to bring much more features. The goal is mostly to demonstrate the
idea that this proposal should be able to do all the things outlined in
this requirements document.

As usual, comments would be welcome.

regards,
Mathieu

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 10:48 -0800, Tom Henderson wrote:
> Here is a current snapshot of our assumed requirements for ns-3 tracing:
> http://www.nsnam.org/temp/trace-requirements.pdf
> 
> We plan to implement a subset of these requirements for our pre-alpha 
> release; namely, an ability to generate "out.tr"-like traces of the 
> queues, and perhaps also pcap-formatted traces.
> 
> Comments, please,
> 
> Tom
>