@node Organization
@chapter Organization

This manual is organized into several parts with several chapters per part.
This chapter describes the overall software organization and the
corresponding organization of this manual.

ns-3 is a discrete-event network simulator in which the simulation core
and models are implemented in C++.  ns-3 is built as a library which
may be statically or dynamically linked to a C++ main program that
defines the simulation topology and starts the simulator.  ns-3 also
exports nearly all of its API to Python, allowing Python programs to
import an "ns3" module in much the same way as in C++.  

@float Figure,fig:organization
@caption{Software organization of ns-3}
@center @image{figures/software-organization, 5in}
@end float

The source code for ns-3 is mostly organized in the @code{src/}
directory and can be described by the diagram in @ref{fig:organization}.
We will work our way from the bottom up; in general, modules
only have dependencies on modules beneath them in the figure.

We first describe Part 1 of the manual.
The simulation core is implemented in @code{src/core}, and the core is
used to build the simulation engine @code{src/simulator}.  Packets are
fundamental objects in a network simulator and are implemented in
@code{src/packet}.  These three simulation modules by themselves 
are intended to comprise a generic simulation core that can be used
by different kinds of networks, not just Internet-based networks.  
The above modules of ns-3 are independent of specific network and 
device models, which are covered in later parts of this manual.

In addition to the above ns-3 core, we describe also in Part 1 two
other modules that supplement the core C++-based API.  ns-3 programs
may access all of the API directly or may make use of a so-called
``helper API'' that provides convenient wrappers or encapsulation of
low-level API calls.  The fact that ns-3 programs can be written to
two APIs (or a combination thereof) is a fundamental aspect of the
simulator and is also covered in Part 1.  We also describe how 
Python is supported in ns-3 as the last chapter of Part 1. 

The remainder of the manual is focused on documenting the models 
and supporting capabilities.  Part 2 focuses on two fundamental
objects in ns-3:  the @code{Node} and @code{NetDevice}.  Two
special NetDevice types are designed to support network emulation
use cases, and emulation is described in Part 3.
Part 4 is devoted to Internet-related models, including the sockets
API used by Internet applications.  Part 5 covers applications, and
Part 6 describes additional support for simulation, such as animators.

The project maintains a separate manual devoted to testing and
validation of ns-3 code (see the 
@uref{http://www.nsnam.org/tutorials.html,, ns-3 Testing and Validation manual}).