[ns] Current state of Broadcast Support

[Damian Philipp]

Hello,

I am working on a simulation for a newly developed protocol in wireless
ad-hoc networks. After quite some digging and experimenting I managed to
find out how to send a Broadcast package
(http://nuraini.net/2007/09/16/unicast-and-broadcat-packet-on-ns2/ is
probably the best source). Now that I am able to send broadcast
packages, I'd also like to be able to receive them.

I found a message sent to this list almost a decade ago:
http://isi.edu/nsnam/archive/ns-users/webarch/2000/msg02832.html

This explains on how one would have to go about patching ns2 so a
broadcast packet can be received by something other than the routing
agent. As this post is 9 years old, this got me wondering: are there
some specific issues related to broadcast handling, that this has not
yet been included in the mainline ns2? Or is there actually a better way
to achieve this?

I also read about a lot of people having problems finding the LL object
in the C++-Code. I too ran into this issue but found that using the
"target_" of the agent works just as well. Is using "target_" a valid
way of broadcasting or is this going to come back and haunt me when I do
more advanced stuff in my Agent?

Regards,
Damian Philipp