1. Wireless Networks for 4G/5G Getting started with ns-3
Instructors: Sumit Roy and Tom Henderson
TA: Collin Brady
UW EE P 569/EE 595 B

2. Summary
Prospective students of EE 595 B are strongly encouraged to review the following material on the ns-3 network simulator prior to the first class on Thursday January 10.
1) this slide deck
2) the ns-3 tutorial, available online in two formats:
HTML:
PDF:
ns-3 will be used as the tool for class projects, and about half of the homework assignments, so please ensure that you have some comfort level with the type of programming described in the ns-3 tutorial
We will cover more details about ns-3 in the first lecture, but will not review all of the enclosed material

3. What is ns-3?
Software to build models of computer networks, to conduct performance evaluation studies such as the following
Research question: What happens to indoor Wi-Fi performance if one
were to co-locate an LTE system on the same or adjacent channel?

4. What is ns-3? (cont.)
ns-3 is a leading open source, packet-level network simulator oriented towards network research, featuring a high-performance core enabling parallelization across a cluster (for large scenarios), ability to run real code, and interaction with testbeds

5. What is ns-3? (cont.)
Packet-level network simulation: The main unit of modeling is the packet and entities that exchange packets.
abstraction
More
Less

6. What you will need for EE 595
You will need to be able to build and run ns-3 programs on a personal computer (Linux, Mac, Windows) or a (Linux) workstation available in the ECE lab infrastructure
The computer that you use should be a development or gaming-class machine for best results (otherwise, your compilation times could be lengthy)
Approximately 5-10 GB of free space is recommended

7. What you will need for EE 595 (cont.)
If your machine is Linux-based, the install process will be the most straightforward
If you have a Mac, you will need to install Xcode software development toolchain (from the App store), but otherwise, should be straightforward
If you run Windows 10, there are a few options:
Install the ‘Windows subsystem for Linux’ for Windows 10; this provides an Ubuntu-based Linux subsystem adequate for ECE 595
Install a Linux virtual machine using Hyper-V, VMware, or VirtualBox
The Cygwin project ( should also work, although we haven’t tested in for a while

8. What you should do next
Once you decide upon which machine to try to use, read through the ns-3 tutorial, including trying to work the examples yourself if you have a machine available
In the tutorial, where it provides options to obtain and install ns-3, please follow the instructions for Git, as we will be using Git in EE 595
Contact both Tom Henderson and Collin Brady if you get stuck with any step in the tutorial, or need advice on a machine to use, even before the first class
This includes any installation questions

9. What you should do next (cont.)
In EE 595, we will use a custom repository available at instead of the main ns-3 development repository
The following commands should work for you, to run the first tutorial program:
$ mkdir workspace
$ cd workspace
$ git clone ee-595.git
$ cd ns-3-ee-595-b
$ git checkout -b course origin/course
$ ./waf configure --enable-examples --enable- tests
$ ./waf build
$ ./waf --run first

10. Summary The ns-3 tutorial may take a couple of hours to work through
In EE 595, we will use a modified repository that has additional wireless models compared to the mainline ns-3
Again, contact one of us to seek help if needed; we will start on Thursday assuming that everyone has given this a try