Distributed Simulation Environment for the ShoX Network Simulator

Discrete-event wireless network simulators are important tools, which enable an efficient development and evaluation of communication protocols. They can be used already at early project stages and provide useful results, when e.g. a real-world deployment or mathematical analysis is not applicable. One of the major challenges in the field of discrete-event wireless network simulators is the relatively high amount of time needed to run simulations. As scenarios and protocols become more complex, the time needed to run simulations can amount to several hours for a single run. At the same time, tens of runs are needed to produce statistically significant results only for one parameter combination, which leads to total simulation run times of several days or even a few weeks, since usually several parameter combinations are needed. Therefore, many developers distribute their simulations manually, which however often yields poor solutions, since only a small portion of their time is available for this task. To cope with this problem, in this paper, we present a distributed environment which extends the ShoX network simulator. It distributes a set of runs automatically and manages the overall simulation execution. The user can determine the nodes on which the simulations are executed, the parameter and seed ranges, among other settings. In order to improve the ease of use, our approach offers a GUI and collects the simulation results at a specified target.