Re: Ns simulator

[kfall@ee.lbl.gov]

>
> From:  Dhanant Subhadrabandhu <dan@ctr.columbia.edu>
> To:    kfall@ee.lbl.gov
> Subject: Ns simulator
> Date:  Fri, 25 Jul 1997 14:33:36 PDT
>
> 
>     Dear Kevin,
> 
>         My name is Dhanant Subhadrabandhu. I am a grduated student at
>     Columbia University. Now I am doing a project and looking for 
>     a suitable simulator. Ns simulator is one of many simulators I had
>     tried. After studied this simulator for weeks, I don't have much idea
>     about this simulator in some details. I just wanna know how to start
>     and get familiar with this simulator. Could you suggest me what I
>     should know and study to obtain my purpose?

We will be putting out a release of ns version 2 later today.
There are a fairly large collection of scripts and a manual page
which should be reasonably accurate.  The "real" documentation is
still in progress, however.  So, my best suggestion at this time is to look
over the scripts and look for the forthcoming documentation.

>     And also I wanna know
>     what are the weak or advantage points in Ns simulator compare with
>     others.

Well, the advantages are that it includes some possibly novel things
(many flavors of tcp, multicast routing, red gateways, *fq gateways, reliable
multicast, cbq, etc).  As for weak points, the documentation needs work,
LANs and mac-layer protocols are relatively new additions and probably are
less well explored than some of the other things.

>     Finally, I heard that they have some bugs in Ns2 right?
>     So what version I should use now?

well, there's bound to be bugs in anything, so I would say go for nsv2...
we will be discontinuing support for nsv1 at some point (hopefully soon).

>     Thank you very much for your concern and time. Hope to get reply
>     from you soon.
> 
>     Sincerely yours,
>     Dhanant Subhadrabandhu
> 

- K