The Raft Implementation on NS-3

Table of Contents:

1. An overview
2. Run Raft on NS-3
3. Getting access to the ns-3 documentation
4. Working with the development version of ns-3

An Open Source project

This project implements the Raft consensus algorithm on the ns-3 network simulator. It is based on the Cornerstone project, which serves as the core implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm. The original project builds on the real networks with multi-threads using a third-party library Asio. In order to test and evaluate the algorithm with scalable number of cluster nodes, we modify the Raft kernel and build a ns-3 network topology to run Raft algorithm on the ns-3 environment.

In our implementation, we still preserve the asio-related version and make it easy to change between real networks and ns-3 environment. To run the ns-3 version of Raft implementation, you don't need to install any third-party libs except for necessary system libs. All logics of Raft and ns-3 are written in C++ and you have access to all those codes in this repository.

ns-3 is a free open source project aiming to build a discrete-event network simulator targeted for simulation research and education. We use the CMake-supported version of ns-3 and our work lies in the examples directory named raftcore. To some extent, we consider the project an application of the ns-3 simulator.

This project is part of the graduation design for bachelor's degree by Yuanjian Liu, Zhejiang University. We anticipate the project to be finished by the end of May, 2020. Currently, the project is under active development.

Running Raft on NS-3

The project is configured with CMakeLists.txt; We recommend you to open this folder with CLion, and you can directly view the codes and run any targets you want.

However, you can always use cmake to build it from the command line. The easiest way to do that is as follows

$ git clone [email protected]:legendPerceptor/ns3-raft.git
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -G "CodeBlocks - Unix Makefiles" $(pwd)
$ make

The above commands will generate lots of cmake-related files that are not useful for us, so we recommend letting CLion do the intricate configuration of cmake.

Our codes locate in examples/raftcore.

Getting access to the ns-3 documentation

Once you have verified that your build of ns-3 works by running the simple-point-to-point example as outlined in 3) above, it is quite likely that you will want to get started on reading some ns-3 documentation.

All of that documentation should always be available from the ns-3 website: http:://www.nsnam.org/documentation/.

This documentation includes:

• a tutorial

• a reference manual

• models in the ns-3 model library

• a wiki for user-contributed tips: http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/

• API documentation generated using doxygen: this is a reference manual, most likely not very well suited as introductory text: http://www.nsnam.org/doxygen/index.html

Working with the development version of ns-3

If you want to download and use the development version of ns-3, you need to use the tool git. A quick and dirty cheat sheet is included in the manual, but reading through the git tutorials found in the Internet is usually a good idea if you are not familiar with it.

If you have successfully installed git, you can get a copy of the development version with the following command:

git clone https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev.git

However, we recommend to follow the Gitlab guidelines for starters, that includes creating a Gitlab account, forking the ns-3-dev project under the new account's name, and then cloning the forked repository. You can find more information in the manual [link].