A practical approach for constructing a parallel network simulator

Network simulation is widely used in network research to evaluate the performance of various network protocols and control algorithms. With the development of computer networks, the network models grow in size and complexity, so the execution time of simulation can be unbearably long. We present a practical approach to construct a parallel network simulator which is based on the popular sequential network simulator ns. Parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) techniques are applied to modify the event scheduling mechanism in ns. Some necessary extensions are also made to ns network model library. Performance measures including speedup and memory consumption are evaluated at last.