View article

During the last year, we have witnessed a lot of people asking for the same question in the ns-users mailing list. How do I develop my own protocol for NS2? By writing this document we hope to help those researchers who need to add a manet routing protocol for NS-2.27. We focus our document in unicast protocols. The document is aimed to those people who are somehow familiar with performing simulations in ns-2, and they want to go one step forward to implement their own protocols. Everything we describe in this text is related to version 2.27 of NS2, but it might be useful for other versions as well. We assume that the reader is familiar with the NS2 basics. That means having read and at least mostly understood “Marc Greis’ Tutorial”[1]. It would be very useful if you also take a look at “The ns Manual”[2], specially chapters 3-5, 10-12, 15-16, 23, 25 and 29. We will refer to them several times throughout this text and encourage you to read them. Before coding your own routing protocol, you should know how to perform simulations with other implemented protocols and you are expected to feel familiar and comfortable with simulator. This will avoid lots of misunderstandings and doubts while reading this document. Besides this tutorial is about programming. You need knowledge about C++ and (a little) Tcl programming. If you aren’t enough experienced with these programming lenguages, you should firstly read any of the excellent resources about them which are freely available in the Internet.