Ns-3-click: Click Modular Router Integration for Ns-3

The Click Modular Router provides a flexible platform for protocol development and testing. Integrating the Click Modular Router with a network simulator offers the advantage of bringing this flexibility into a simulation framework. The existing integration of Click with ns-2 (nsclick) has several limitations, namely it cannot be used with generic traffic generators, transport protocols and NetDevices. For the integration with ns-3, we address these limitations. Furthermore, the design of ns-3 makes it much better suited for embedding Click than does ns-2. This includes the closer alignment of ns-3 with real world packet formats and designs, and the handling of multiple interfaces per node. In this paper, we describe ns-3-click, discuss its design and how it improves over nsclick. Our experiments suggest that ns3-click does not incur significant performance hits as far as wall clock run time is concerned, but uses more memory than normal ns-3.