[Ns-developers] [ns3] Statistical framework (draft)

[Joseph Kopena]

Hi Vincent, everybody,

Sorry for some delay getting back to this, I've been traveling the
past few days.  On the upside, that meant a good chunk of airport time
for coding.

I've posted a repo at [1] that drafts some of my conception of the
stat framework.  Here's the basic ideas:

- A stat framework object provides functionality to create stat
objects and specifies an output callback.
- Stat objects track different generic statistics and are updated by
events, trace firings, etc.
- Each stat object uses the callback to give its output to the
specific framework being used, which in turn renders that data (e.g.,
as plain text or XML).

Note that unlike most ns-3 WIPs, this is currently setup externally,
not as a branch of ns-3-dev.  This was mostly done to reduce compile
(make faster than waf?) and link time, as well as ease eventual
merging.  To compile, just run make in the root directory.  It'll
expect the env variable NS3_LIB_DIR to be set.  This is usually the
build/debug/ subdirectory of your ns-3 repository, e.g. for me it's
usually export NS3_LIB_DIR=/opt/ns-3-dev/build/debug/.

I'll be working on the basics of this the next couple days as I need
some of this functionality.  In addition to cleaning it up a bit, I'll
be adding some simple statistics and demo'ing connections to trace
sources.  I most likely won't get to more sophisticated measures
anytime soon.

Vincent, have you drafted code or more ideas?  I am not super-tied to
the draft code in [1], but wanted to get something out there as well
as demonstrate the kind of generic statistics I'm envisioning.  Your
input on the approach as well as your help making this a generally
usable component would be greatly appreciated.  Mathieu's writeup also
provides some solid motivation, discussion, and references that should
be followed up on.

Thx!

[1] http://code.nsnam.org/tjkopena/ns-3-stat/

-- 
- joe kopena
right here and now