Understanding Basic Aspects of a ns-2 Simulation

Actually, for an average CS Student, it will take some years 😯 (or at least several months), for the complete understanding of ns2. Even after such understanding, writing a new protocol for ns2 will be a challenging task 🙄 . For beginners, even the simplest simulation script will tests their patience while trying to get meaningful results. One may try ns2 on linux or Cygwin, in any case, the following facts will be useful.

Understand the Coding Aspects of a Simulation.
First of all try to understand and visualize what is simulation. Some people think that simulation of a protocol is some what inferior to the actual implementation of that protocol in some operating system or hardware. But an experienced programmer will not feel any difference between the two.

Try to understand time Aspects of a Simulation.
For simulating one second of a network scenario, it may take few minuets or hours for the simulator if the scenario is huge and complex. Or it may take less than a second for the simulator if the scenario is small or we are using a fast computer for the simulation.

Learn From Tutorial and ns2 Manual.
Complete the following tutorials. For that, take maximum time (few weeks) and do all the examples from the tutorial.
➡ 1. The Famous ns2 Tutorial by Marc Greis http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/tutorial/
➡ 2. NS by Example by Jae Chung and Mark Claypool http://nile.wpi.edu/NS/
➡ 3. Learn From the Official ns2 Manual. http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/doc/index.html

Finally, come to your problem, and try to develop the code from the previously studied models. If your problem is a genuine research problem, then the whole learning process will certainly consume few years (or at least several months). Then only you will succeed.

As for as I know, there is no other simple way of doing a ns2 research simulation 🙁 .