An XML Experiment Description Language for ns

While the ns3 tool has been shown to be an excellent tool for researchers and network designers to analyze and evalu- ate network performance, the use of ns3 in educational class- room environments has less success. The use of ns3 to illus- trate network design principles to lowerlevel undergraduate students requires considerable skill in the C++ programming language, and appears to be beyond the ability of first or sec- ond year undergraduate students. Further, teaching faculty at the university level are also unlikely to have these skills, or the desire to obtain them to use ns3. In order to allow novices to use ns3 to construct simple experiments and observe results, we have created the ns3xml frontend processor for ns3, that reads a flat text file in the wellknown XML format and then constructs and executes an ns3 experiment based on the XML description of the experiment.