Design, Realization and Evaluation of a Component-based, Compositional Network Simulation Environment

Abstract

In this paper, we present a component-based network simulation environment that provides a systematic way to simulate, with high fidelity, protocol operations in a variety of target network architectures. We take a four-step approach to developing such a composable network simulation environment with reusable components. First, we lay a component-based software architecture, called the autonomous component architecture (ACA). Second, we propose a new real-time, process-driven simulation technique that fits naturally in ACA and simulates the real system realistically. Third, we devise a packet-based network simulation framework, called extensible internetworking framework (INET), on top of ACA. Fourth, we implement in Java both ACA and INET, and several representative suites of protocol components in a variety of network architectures. The resulting codes, along with a scripting framework, constitute a network simulation environment called J-Sim. By virtue of the many desirable features inherited from ACA, the J-Sim environment meets the flexibility, composability, reusability, extensibility and diagnosability requirements. The price JSim pays for the many desirable features is, however, the inter-component communication overhead. In this paper, we show (via experimentation) that this overhead is not significant (in the range of 0.2-0.6 1s), and J-Sim achieves better scalability than two other network simulators in the public domains, ns-2 and Scalable Simulation Framework Network Models (SSFNET), in terms of both the experiment setup time and the simulation completion time.

TailCon: Power-Minimizing Tail Percentile Control of Response Time in Server Clusters

“…Due to the experimental resource limitation, we cannot conduct experiments on a large-scale server cluster with each physical machine configured as a single server, hence we build a discrete event emulator based on J-Sim [19] to simulate a server cluster with totally 15 servers. The frontend decides how many servers to turn on and which CPU frequency for each server to run in each sampling period.…”

Centralizing the Power Saving Mode for 802.11 Infrastructure Networks

“…Unfortunately, many publicly available simulators, such as J-SIM (Tyan, 2002), have not implemented most operations for infrastructure networks and the PSM, such as the beacon frames and PS-Poll frames. Even for the de facto simulator ns-2 (Berkeley et al, 1996), it is surprising that its PSM module (Krashinsky & Balakrishnan, 2005) supports only a single client.…”

Utility-based Adaptive Resource Allocation in Hybrid Wireless Networks

“…Our simulations were performed in a simulation environment described by Jonasson [12] and built on top of J-Sim, a component-based, simulation environment developed at Ohio State University [22,11]. For the linear programming part, we have used the java package from the operation research objects collection (OR-Objects) [10].…”