A generic framework for parallelization of network simulations

TLDR

Discrete‑event simulation is widely used in networking to validate protocols, but detailed models often incur excessive runtime and memory, motivating the need to parallelize existing serial simulators. The study aims to develop a practical, scalable parallel and distributed simulation framework that enables reuse of existing sequential network simulation models. The framework builds subnetworks from an existing simulator, composes them into larger network simulations, and minimizes changes to the original code so that updates are easily incorporated. Applying the approach to the ns simulator on a workstation cluster showed that the method can be successfully converted to parallel execution, yielding lessons for future implementations.

Abstract

Discrete event simulation is widely used within the networking community for purposes such as demonstrating the validity of network protocols and architectures. Depending on the level of detail modeled within the simulation, the running time and memory requirements can be excessive. The goal of our research is to develop and demonstrate a practical, scalable approach to parallel and distributed simulation that will enable widespread reuse of sequential network simulation models and software. We focus on an approach to parallelization where an existing network simulator is used to build models of subnetworks that are composed to create simulations of larger networks. Changes to the original simulator care minimized, enabling the parallel simulator to easily track enhancements to the sequential version. We describe our lessons learned in applying this approach to the publicly available ns software package (McCanne and Floyd, 1997) and converting it to run in a parallel fashion on a network of workstations. This activity highlights a number of important problems, from the standpoint of how to parallelize an existing serial simulation model and achieving acceptable parallel performance.