Design issues in building a scalable network simulation/emulation middleware

Constant inventions in the field of distributed systems raise up the demands on network simulators. Resources needed for simulation of thousands to millions of nodes can be provided only by making simulators distributed. In the design process of distributed systems scalability and transparency present the key requirements. Some of the existing models for distributed systems can be used to model both of this needs, for example peer-to-peer architecture can model scalability, while middleware can model the transparency. By identifying key management issues in distributed simulation and by borrowing these concepts from distributed systems, we describe a new simulation layer that can be used by a variety of simulators.