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Simulation of computer networks is an area of growing interest. Network simulation is a multidisciplinary endeavor requiring expertise in computer networking, modeling and simulation, and software engineering. Network modeling and simulation tools in the research community provide important exemplar technology that has the potential for reuse. NetSim, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an excellent example of a network simulation infrastructure that can support a variety of modifications.In this paper we discuss NetSim and two additional tools: the Maryland Routing Simulator and the Texas A&M Asynchronous Transfer Mode Simulator, which are both modifications of NetSim. NetSim can serve as a simple but effective Ethernet or point-to-point network simulator. Additionally, NetSim can serve as a rapid prototyping tool for other network simulators.

Understanding interactions among various components in a distributed system is very important for system administrators and application developers. The System Monitoring Tool (SMT)i provides the ability to view OSF/DCE traffic at multiple levels of detail, which makes this tool useful to application writers as well as people debugging protocol. SMT allows simultaneous monitoring of multiple network segments and provides protocol a ware decoding of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) activity. SMT consists of two components: a remote monitoring agent to capture packets, and a host workstation software program which analyzes and groups the captured packets according to their RPC transaction. The RPC can be viewed at multiple levels of granularity, from raw packets to complete RPC transactions. The tool is an applied example of hierarchical specification of communication protocols.