TOUR DE NS2: WHERE TO START

Hey All, On early stage everyone has a confusion that What hardware I needed? What are the minimum requirement for ns2? What OS I need for installation? Where can I find ns2 software package? How do I install my package?  Huh. A lot!!!!  😖😖😕😥

Don't worry!!! 😄Ns2 Bloggers is here to help you. Lets start from scratch. Hurrayyyy!!!!!!!!!😀😀

Minimum Machine Requirement

The answer is simple: Any computer with reasonable Memory and Storage. Simple scenarios should run on any reasonable machine, but very large scenarios benefit from large amounts of memory.

There is no such suggestions available from official sites about machine requirements. Still, ns2bloggers suggest following configuration;

• Processor with a speed of 500MHz and above.
• RAM of minimum 64MB.
• Hard disk of minimum 500MB. NS2 package is fairly a large package. The allinone package requires about 320MB of disk space to build. 

All laptops/Computers available in the market are advanced than this. So, you can use a better  configuration than the basic requirement. 

OS Requirement and Installation Procedure

No need to worry about this, now ns2 supports in Windows, Linux and MAC. But each one has different installation procedure. You can see installation procedures from the following links;

• NS2 Installation on Linux
• NS2 Installation on Linux VM using Windows
• NS2 Installation on Windows Using Cygwin
• NS2 Installation on MAC

Software Package

There are two ways to build ns:

• From all the pieces
• All at once

 If you just want to try it out quickly, you might try all at once. If you want to do C-level development, or save download time or disk space, or have trouble with all-in-one you should build it from all the pieces. The available latest version of ns2 is ns2.35.

All at Once Package

You can download ns2.35 allinone package from following here

From all the pieces

If you are a pro or you want to save some space, you can definitely install ns2 from pieces. Ns depends on several externally available components. Below is a summary of where to get them and where they may already be (if you're a VINT developer). Since the components depend on each other, you should build them in the listed order.

Tcl/Tk

• A modestly up to date Tcl/Tk version Tcl/Tk-8.5
• web page: Tcl Developer Xchange resources.
  Note that while more up to date versions of Tcl/Tk are available and may work, we have only tested up through version 8.5.10.

otcl

• version 1.14 (released Oct 30 2011)
• daily snapshot
• anonymous CVS (package "otcl")
• web page: http://otcl-tclcl.sourceforge.net/otcl/.

TclCL (the package formerly known as libTcl)

• The latest version tclcl-1.20 (released Oct 30, 2011)
• daily snapshot
• anonymous CVS (package "tclcl")
• web page: http://otcl-tclcl.sourceforge.net/tclcl/.

ns-2

• most recent release (ns-2.35 released Nov 4 2011)
• daily snapshot,
• anonymous cvs (module "ns-2").

nam-1 (optional)

• most recent release (nam-1.15 released Nov 4 2011)
• daily snapshot,
• anonymous cvs (module "nam-1").
• web page: http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/nam/

You can find pre-built binary of nam-1.11 for Linux/freeBSD from the nam page.

xgraph (optional, but needed for test suites)

            Download source:version 12.1, or by anonymous cvs (module "xgraph"). 

  Web page: http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/xgraph/.

(This version is maintained by the ns maintainers and includes portability fixes over the older 12.0 release.)

perl (optional, but needed for test suites)

Download source: latest stable release; web page: http://language.perl.com/

Note that version 5.003 or later is required.

tcl-debug (optional, available for Tcl debugging help)

Download source: version 1.7;

Web page: http://expect.nist.gov/tcl-debug/. This version will work with Tcl/Tk 8.0 release.

dmalloc (optional, available for memory debugging)

Download source: version 4.8.0. 

Web page: http://www.dmalloc.com; specify --with-dmalloc during configure to include.

sgb2ns conversion program (optional, needed to convert GT-ITM output to ns-2 format)

Download source: sgb2ns conversion program. For more info on GT-ITM topology generators see GT-ITM Topology Generator.

tiers2ns conversion program (optional, needed to convert Tiers output to ns-2 format)

Download source: tiers2ns.awk. For more info on Tiers topology generators see Tiers Topology Generator.

Cweb and sgb source code (optional, required to create sgb-library that is used by gt-itm and sgb2ns programs)

Download cweb source from cweb ftp page

Download sgb source code from sgb ftp page

VINT developers at ISI can find all of these packages in /nfs/filb2/public/pkgs.

 Please note you have to check the bug fixes after you finish installation! 

Happy Coding.... 😉😉