VANET-Skeleton for ns2

Daniel Jungels
Laboratory for computer Communications and Applications (LCA)
EPFL
December 23, 2005

This document quickly describes how to install ns2, and how to implement a VANET protocol
(using a broadcast example protocol as basis).

1 NS2
First, you have to install the network simulator in your home directory. The simplest way to get
started is to use the ns-allinone package. At the moment of this writing, version 2.29 was the
most recent one. Because of this, all line-numbers later in this document (given to help you find
the mentioned code parts faster) refer to this version. However, there is always an explanation
in what enum, class or function the changes have to be made.
In the explanations, I use /home/myuser as home directory, and the simulator will be installed
in /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29. You can find ns-allinone at http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/.
The downloaded archive files ns-allinone-2.29.tar.gz (from the ns website) and vanetrbc-ns229.tgz
(from http://ivc.epfl.ch/) are now supposed to be in /home/myuser. I also suppose that you are
using Linux (for example the LCA project PCs at EPFL, you can also connect via ssh from a
Windows PC to those machines).
So, we start by extracting and installing the ns-allinone package:
cd /home/myuser
tar -xvzf ns-allinone-2.29.tar.gz
cd ns-allinone-2.29
./install
This takes a while (both the extraction of the files and the installation). After the installation
script has finished successfully, you must edit your shell configuration files (this is also explained
at the end of the installation script): I give here the examples for bash and tcsh. For tcsh, add
the following lines to /home/myuser/.cshrc:
set path = ( ${path} /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/bin \
/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/tcl8.4.11/unix \
/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/tk8.4.11/unix )

set LD_LIBRARY_PATH = ( /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/otcl-1.11 \

/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/lib )

set TCL_LIBRARY = ( /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/tcl8.4.11/library )

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For bash, add the following lines to /home/myuser/.bashrc:
PATH=${PATH}:/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/bin
PATH=${PATH}:/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/tcl8.4.11/unix
PATH=${PATH}:/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/tk8.4.11/unix
export PATH

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/otcl-1.11:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

TCL_LIBRARY=/home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/tcl8.4.11/library:${TCL_LIBRARY}
export TCL_LIBRARY
Reload your shell-configuration: for tcsh execute in your terminal
source /home/myuser/.cshrc
or for bash
source /home/myuser/.bashrc
or simply logout and login again. Now ns should be installed and ready to use.

2 Adding the VanetRBC protocol

Now we install an example protocol, that you can use as a basis for your own protocol. Please
keep in mind that this “protocol” (as it is in the archive) does not do anything useful apart
from creating channel load, but you can use it to inspire yourself for getting started with your
protocol. Extract all the data from the tgz-archive:
cd /home/myuser
mkdir /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/vanetrbc
tar -xvzf vanetrbc-ns229.tgz -C /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/vanetrbc
To make ns aware of your protocol, edit the following files:

• In ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/common/packet.h, in the enum packet t (line 170), insert (don’t

forget the comma at the end)

PT_VANETRBC,

• and in the same file in the class p info (line 266), insert

name_[PT_VANETRBC]="VanetRBC";

• In ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/tcl/lib/ns-packet.tcl, in the foreach prot loop calling add-packet-

header, insert (e.g., line 156)

VanetRBC # Vanet protocol (or your comment)

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 • In ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/tcl/lib/ns-default.tcl, for example at the end of the file, insert
these lines (these are example values used to initialize the parameters, but they can always
be overriden in your TCL-scripts):

Agent/VanetRBC set interval_ 1

Agent/VanetRBC set jitterFactor_ 0.005
Agent/VanetRBC set crypto_delay_ 0

• In ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/Makefile: in the OBJ CC part, insert (don’t forget the back-

slash at the end)

vanetrbc/vanetrbc.o vanetrbc/vanetrbc_rxdatadb.o \

The following changes are not strictly necessary, but probably you want to make them to
prevent lots of messages cluttering up your screen (forcing you to search for the messages you
actually want to see):
• In ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/mobile/dumb-agent.cc (line 96), you may comment out the line

printf("Recvd brdcast pkt\n");

since in VANET, all packets are broadcast.

• In ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/mobile/propagation.cc (line 158):

printf("%lf: d: %lf, Pr: %e\n", Scheduler::instance().clock(), d, Pr);

For the beginning, this “printf” may be useful because you can see where your simulation
is right now (time), and what distances are used in your scenario (i.e., if your transmission
range is defined correctly). However, after some time they become annoying. So maybe
leave them for now, but you may comment out this “printf” later.
Finally, you can recompile ns, with the new protocol:
cd /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/
make clean
make
The “make clean” is necessary because you have changed some header-files, but not the .cc files
(therefore, make does not notice that you changed the .h). The example RBC protocol should
be ready to run. You can execute a test script (containing also the necessary parameters for
802.11a) with
cd /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/vanetrbc
ns vntest.tcl
If at the end of the simulation you get an error message saying that nam could not be executed,
please read Section 4.4.

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3 Adding your protocol
You can now take the RBC-protocol as a basis for your VANET protocol. There are lots of
comments in the source files, have a look at them! You may also want to rename the entire stuff,
simply check for “RBC” (or “rbc”) and change them to your own protocol name (in the .cc and
.h files in the vanetrbc directory, and in all places that you changed in the previous section).
Please note that if you make a copy of the VanetRBC protocol in a different directory, and want
both to co-exist (your protocol and VanetRBC ), you must rename the structures of the packet
headers in your new protocol, so that no packet headers of the two protocols share the same
name.
While developing (debugging) your protocol, it is not necessary to redo the “make clean” every
time you recompile the code. If you change a header file of your protocol (but not a general file of
the rest of the ns-core), a “touch *.cc” in the directory containing your protocol is sufficient. To
recompile ns with your updated protocol, simply execute “make” in the ns-allinone-2.29/ns-2.29/
directory.

4 Hints for implementing your VANET protocol

4.1 Tracelog
The tracelog file can be used in different ways, depending on your preferences. One example
is to simply use it as replacement for the standart output (stdout), so dumping normal human
readable text to it. Another way (which is especially interesting when regularly dumping some
parameters to the file) is to put all necessary information on one line (with spaces as separator),
and put a special keyword in front of it. Like this, it becomes possible to parse the file (for
example with awk ) in exactly the same way as the normal tracefiles. In the awk-filters, you
simply choose the parameters you need, and you ignore the rest. The advantage of using this
special tracefile for such protocol-related status dumps (instead of the normal tracefile) becomes
clear when running simulations with a high number of nodes: parsing several times (with different
awk-filters) a tracefile of 1 Mbyte is faster than parsing several times a file of 1 or 2 Gbyte.

4.2 Performance issues

If you need to regularly (e.g., every 100 ms) dump some statistics (or values of some variables)
to the tracelog file, for example for evaluating them afterwards with awk, it is very inefficient to
schedule a function in the TCL-script with this period (i.e., create a for-loop that schedules all
these events). When the period becomes small (and thus the number of events increases), the
time it takes TCL to sort the event list becomes extremely high. In this case, it is better to move
this to the C++ part: in the same way as the timer for sending regularly messages, implement
a timer for dumping the statistics. If you only want to dump some statistics at the end of your
simulation, it is of course enough to put a function that dumps the necessary data, and to call
it once or a few times from the TCL script (without timer).

4.3 Comment on the data included in the archive

Please also note, that the scenario included in the skeleton is a very reduced example! It only uses
50 nodes (which for some simulations may not be enough), and has only mobility information
for 80 seconds (which is probably not enough for real simulations, because of the low speed of
the vehicles in this scenario). You may use this for your first tests, but afterwards it is probably

4
a good idea to generate some more relevant scenarios. For your information, this example has
been generated with the Rice Mobility generator, using the West university place data file as
input.

4.4 Compilation of nam failed

In some cases (with specific versions of gcc) the compilation of nam may fail (you may notice
this for example, when trying to execute nam, and there is no executable file in the bin directory.
If this happens to you, try to recompile nam,
cd /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/nam-1.11/
make
and check if the error message comes from the agent.h file. If this is the case, open the file agent.h
and replace “NULL” by “0” at the declaration of findClosestCornertoPoint (line 73). Restart
compilation (“make”). After a successful compilation, add a symbolic link to the bin directory
(to be able to call nam from everywhere, since bin is in the path):
ln -s /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/nam-1.11/nam /home/myuser/ns-allinone-2.29/bin/nam

4.5 More documentation

• The ns Manual contains a lot of details, you may have a look at it if you run into trouble.
http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ns-documentation.html
• You may also go through Marc Greis’ ns tutorial. It quickly explains the basics of ns2.
http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/tutorial/
• If you are new to TCL, this tutorial explains quite well the basics:
http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/tcltutorial.html
• The MASIMUM project has created a document (also a sort of tutorial) on how to imple-
ment a routing protocol in ns2: Implementing a New Manet Unicast Routing Protocol in
ns2. Even though this is unicast, it also may give you some hints for implementing your
protocol.
http://masimum.dif.um.es/
• Realistic Mobility Modelling for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: the previously mentioned mo-
bility generator from Rice.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/˜amsaha/Research/MobilityModel/
• The homepage of the EPFL Vehicular Networks Security project:
http://ivc.epfl.ch/