struggling in installing ns3-ai with ndnSIM on ubuntu 22.04

[M. Shahzad Arshad]

Dear all

I am working on ndnSIM and want to integrate federated learning to implement it with NDN for my experimentation in my research work.

I am trying to integrate ns3-ai with ndnSIm but it is nor working as ndnSIM is configured and build using ./waf while it uses cmake.

How can I fix this issue? 

Else if any other suitable tool is recommended or suggested.

Kidly assist. 

Thanks and regards

Shahzad Arshad

[Tommaso Pecorella]

I don't want to give you bad news, but there's no way to put it in a different way.

ndnSIM last update was 2 years ago (a very long time), and the ns-3 sources did evolve a lot in the meantime. Not only we're using cmake, we also moved away from pybindgen, so the python interface is quite different in some very important points.

The problem is that as far as I know ns3-ai uses the "new" python interface, so it's not just a matter of cmake.

One possibility could be to adapt ns3-ai to ndnSIM, but I have no idea if this is possible, or how hard it could be.

Another possibility could be to "revive" ndnSIM and forward port it to use a newer ns-3 version as its base, but even this might be a very complex task, as ndnSIM made some "fixes" to its own ns-3 base system, and I don't know which ones have been accepted to the ns-3 code, and how many breaking changes we made in the meantime.

The third alternative is to just use ndnSIM as a guideline and reimplement it from scratch. Sometimes it's easier than forward porting.

So, overall, I'd say that the alternatives go from "ouch" to "triple ouch", and I don't know which one of them is the less painful one. For sure there's none classified as "easy".

I also checked if a different simulator exists. It does: NDNOMNeT, last updated... 4 years ago. Doesn't look good either.

Sorry...

[M. Shahzad Arshad]

Dear sir,

thank you for your time and response, you are right the technology has developed and ndnSIM is at its pause mod.

I found ns3-ai compatible version (1.10), installed it and it is also working. I do not know will it further helpful for me in my research work or not but as of now i am feeling hopes to move on.

I share my experience for struggler like me, if might be helpful for them. 

ns3-ai has 3 version 1.0.0, 1.1.0 and 1.2..

version 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 both are compatible with ns-3.32 and ns-3.35 respectively.

it is quite simple to install, but 1.2.0 is not compatible  with ns-3.35 but compatible with ns-3.38.

here is the link to download 

https://github.com/hust-diangroup/ns3-ai/releases.

I really thank full to you for your guidance.

bundle of thanks 

Be blessed 

Regards

M. Shahzad Arshad