A traffic scaling approach to speed up network simulations

Telecommunication operators frequently evaluate network performance to validate and optimise network designs by simulation. There is a big problem in this context: simulations often require a long run-time to get accurate results. We address this problem, presenting a new traffic scaling approach to reduce the number of events to be simulated. The proposed method is based on the idea of scaling link capacity and input traffic by a common scaling factor in order to speed up simulations. We analyse the accuracy of this technique for a multiservice asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network technology, even if such an approach can be applied to other transport technologies. Experiments show good accuracy and high speedup values compared to alternative solutions.