DEFIANCE project: How to Simulate MARL Deployments in Realistic Network Scenarios

Our project mainly builds upon the ns3 network simulator, ns3-ai for ML integration.

We provide a framework for ML and RL research using ns3. You can find our design documentation and user documentation here.

For a practical example of how our framework is used, see this Medium article. The blog is divided into two parts and demonstrates building a balancing inverted pendulum in a network scenario using our framework.

Setup the development environment

Installation with setup helper

See https://github.com/DEFIANCE-project/bake-defiance for easy instructions. Despite the name, it doesn't use bake anymore.

Docker

If you just want a docker container ready to build ns3-defiance, pull <ghcr.io/defiance-project/bake-defiance:full-latest>.

For development, we supply a Dockerfile here, in which you can build your custom changes to ns3-defiance. It builds upon the aforementioned docker image. Then, you can build a docker image containing your local changes with a simple docker build .. The ns3 root directory is at $NS3_HOME; the default working directory. By default, ns3 and ns3-defiance are built directly. To skip the build, add --build-arg BUILD_NS3=False.

Manual installation

Requirements: Depending on your use-case, different dependencies are needed. For a complete list of all possible development dependencies, refer to our devcontainer Dockerfile

1. Clone ns3 git clone https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev.git -b ns-3.XX

1. Some of our code needs that the environment variable NS3_HOME is set. Set it with export NS3_HOME=$(pwd)/ns-3.XX

1. Clone ns3-ai and ns3-defiance into ns3/contrib:

   -c
     cd ns-3-dev/
     git clone https://github.com/DEFIANCE-project/ns3-ai contrib/ai
     git clone https://github.com/DEFIANCE-project/ns3-defiance contrib/defiance

1. Install the python dependency of defiance with poetry: poetry -C contrib/defiance install --without local and activate the venv.

1. Make sure, you have all other dependencies. Running ./ns3 configure --enable-python --enable-examples --enable-tests should succeed.

1. Then, compile ns3-ai to generate the message types with protobuf: ./ns3 build ai

1. Install the python packages of ns3-ai with poetry -C contrib/defiance install --with local

1. Compile everything with ./ns3 build

1. You are now able to start the training of our example scenario, such as defiance-balance2 with run-agent train -n defiance-handover. See run-agent --help for more info.

Development tools

This repo comes with additional developer tools, which may be installed with poetry install --with dev.

• We format and lint our python code with ruff. Simply run ruff check to lint and ruff format to format.
• We enforce type-checking on our code with mypy. Simply run it!
• Optional jupyter notebook support can be installed with poetry. Simply run poetry install --with ipynb!

In order to test ns3, it needs to be configured correctly. Refer to https://github.com/DEFIANCE-project/bake-defiance for a complete command suggestion.

The ns3 testsuites in the test directory can be run with ./test.py -s <test-suite>, e.g. ./test.py -s defiance-agent-application for the defiance-agent-application testsuite in /test/agent-application-test.cc. For further information refer to https://www.nsnam.org/docs/manual/html/how-to-write-tests.html.

The special ns3-ai tests need to be executed with pytest contrib/defiance.

Frequent problems

When you run a ns3 simulation which uses ns3-ai, a segmentation fault occurs. A corresponding python agent is required to run the simulation. For this, you can use the run-agent cli program, i.e. run-agent train for training with ray and run-agent debug for debugging and run-agent random for a random agent. Check out run-agent -h for help.