Available for research, development, and use.

Download latest release:

Most recent stable release
(currently ns-3.14.1)

Older archived releases:

All releases

Documentation:

Most recent stable release
(currently ns-3.14.1)

Project documentation:

All documentation

Downloading stable releases

ns-3 makes unpackaged source releases only at this time. Downloading the latest stable release should be straightforward, from the main project page. Archived older releases are also linked there.

Downloading development tree

Some people may want to work with our development branch, which is ns-3-dev. We've introduced a framework to ease working with the development version. It is called ns-3-allinone. As of early January 2009, downloading of optional components to ns-3 has been delegated to a download script in this ns-3-allinone framework.
Using the development tree requires mercurial. Try the following steps:

 hg clone http://code.nsnam.org/ns-3-allinone
 cd ns-3-allinone
 ./download.py

You should then have the following directory structure in ns-3-allinone/

 build.py*     dist.py*      ns-3-dev/   pybindgen/  util.py
 constants.py  download.py*  nsc/        README

If you start using these development trees a lot, you should consider learning more about mercurial and looking at our mercurial page.

Building

Once users have downloaded ns-3 (a developement or stable version), they will want to then invoke build.py to start a coordinated build.

 ./build.py

If all goes well, one can cd into ns-3-dev and run the ns-3 tests:

 cd ns-3-dev
./waf check

Using cygwin

Cygwin works reasonably-well by default: just make sure you grab the cygwin installer from http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe. cygwin includes support for mercurial, gcc, and, python so, nothing else should be needed.

Using mingw

Although we do not really support mingw because it requires more work to setup than cygwin, some people do use it with ns-3.
The following instructions are not complete and are not for the faint of heart. First, grab:

• The core mingw system: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mingw/MinGW-5.1.4.exe
• python: http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.5.2/python-2.5.2.msi

Since msvc cannot build ns-3, you need to tell WAF to use your mingw g++ compiler instead:

./waf configure --check-cxx-compiler=g++

You might need additional packages, depending on your needs:

• the msys shell. Warning: you should not use the msys terminal, as it does not play well with native windows binaries, such as Python. Just put the path to the msys binaries in the system PATH environment variable (My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced), but _do NOT_ run the msys terminal. Instead, run a plain old Windows terminal;
• mercurial. You will need this if you plan to use mercurial.