[Ns-developers] Brief summary of ns-3-nsc IRC meeting

[Florian Westphal]

This is brief summary of the ns-3-nsc integration meeting on
July 18th reagarding the nsc merge plan.

Participants: Tom Henderson, Sam Jansen, Florian Westphal
IRC log:
http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/ns-3?date=2008-07-18,Fri

Agenda:
A. Known problems and Limitations
=====================
1) build 64bit + integration of nsc into ns-3 build system

Sam said that he had updated the Linux 2.6.18 stack to work on x86-64
and that he would update other stacks once nsc had more of a build system.
Florian mentioned that he has added an --nsc switch to enable nsc
conditionally in ns-3.
Action: Florian will add auto downloading of nsc and an extra check to
detect when nsc is being built on an unsupported platform.

2) ipv4 -- if its possible to do the full TCP/IP stack and how
that impacts IPv4 refactoring and API changes that are being considered

Sam mentioned that SCTP is working again in the Linux 2.6.26 port, and
that the ns-3 integration was more in terms of nsc being a protocol stack,
rather than a TCP model.
The main problem with replacing ns-3 ipv4 is routing.

3) routing and multiple interfaces

Sam stated that it was easy to add more interfaces to an nsc node
and that the main problem is routing, that is, some route glue code needs
to take an ns-3 route and program the corresponding nsc stack.
Florian added that one would also need to map every ns-3 interface to
an nsc interface.  Sam and Florian agreed that this was a large project.

4) socket errors + errno not being handled correctly

Florian and Sam agreed that this is easy to solve.
Action: Florian will fix this before merge.

B. other
=====================
- example scripts and documentation

All agreed that nsc needs better tests/examples.
Action: Florian will write a new nsc example scenario.

- sigcomm demo

Florian will help to add some nsc features to the demo script(s).
Tom mentioned he'd like to build some documentation then for users to
start to use nsc if they want.
Sam said he and Florian would make sure to add more of that when integration
got a bit further along.
Tom will have a look at some of the ns-2 scripts from Sams
Thesis/publications to see wether those might be ported to ns-3.


Results and Summary
=====================

NSC will move to WAF.
Florian will first work on a new nsc example scenario, then on the
waf/nsc build system, Sam will help out as he can.
After this Florian will fix the errno problem.

* integrate into the waf system
* fix 64 bit builds
* add to nightly regression (and debug those issues)
* fix errno problem
* have  a code review to plan to merge

Thanks, Florian