
    The Network Simulator, Version 3
    --------------------------------

Table of Contents:
------------------

1) An overview
2) Building ns-3
3) Running ns-3
4) Getting access to the ns-3 documentation
5) Working with the development version of ns-3

Note:  Much more substantial information about ns-3 can be found at
http://www.nsnam.org

1) An Open Source project
-------------------------

ns-3 is a free open source project aiming to build a discrete-event
network simulator targeted for simulation research and education.   
This is a collaborative project; we hope that
the missing pieces of the models we have not yet implemented
will be contributed by the community in an open collaboration
process.

Contributing to the ns-3 project is still a very informal
process because that process depends heavily on the background
of the people involved, the amount of time they can invest
and the type of model they want to work on.  

Despite this lack of a formal process, there are a number of 
steps which naturally stem from the open-source roots of the
project.  These steps are described in doc/contributing.txt

2) Building ns-3
----------------

The code for the framework and the default models provided
by ns-3 is built as a set of libraries. User simulations
are expected to be written as simple programs that make
use of these ns-3 libraries.

To build the set of default libraries and the example
programs included in this package, you need to use the
tool 'waf'. Detailed information on how use waf is 
included in the file doc/build.txt

However, the real quick and dirty way to get started is to
type the command "./waf configure; ./waf" the the directory which contains
this README file. The files built will be copied in the
build/debug or build/optimized.

The current codebase is expected to build and run on the
set of platforms listed in the RELEASE_NOTES file.

Other platforms may or may not work: we welcome patches to 
improve the portability of the code to these other platforms. 

3) Running ns-3
---------------

On recent Linux systems, once you have built ns-3, it 
should be easy to run the sample programs with the
following command:

./waf --run simple-global-routing

That program should generate a simple-global-routing.tr text 
trace file and a set of simple-global-routing-xx-xx.pcap binary
pcap trace files, which can be read by tcpdump -tt -r filename.pcap

4) Getting access to the ns-3 documentation
-------------------------------------------

Once you have verified that your build of ns-3 works by running
the simple-point-to-point example as outlined in 4) above, it is
quite likely that you will want to get started on reading
some ns-3 documentation. 

All of that documentation should always be available from
the ns-3 website: http:://www.nsnam.org/ but we
include some of it in this release for ease of use.

This documentation includes:

  - a tutorial
 
  - a manual

  - a wiki for user-contributed tips: http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/

  - an API documentation generated using doxygen: this is
    a reference manual, most likely not very well suited 
    as introductory text:
    http://www.nsnam.org/doxygen/index.html

5) Working with the development version of ns-3
-----------------------------------------------

If you want to download and use the development version 
of ns-3, you need to use the tool 'mercurial'. A quick and
dirty cheat sheet is included in doc/mercurial.txt but
reading through the mercurial tutorials included on the
mercurial website is usually a good idea if you are not
familiar with it.

If you have successfully installed mercurial, you can get
a copy of the development version with the following command:
"hg clone http://code.nsnam.org/ns-3-dev"
