Optimizing parallel execution of detailed wireless network simulation

With parallel and discrete event simulation (PDES) techniques, the runtime performance of detailed wireless network simulation can be improved significantly without compromising fidelity of the simulation results. However, modelling characteristics of wireless communications such as signal propagation and interference may severely hinder the potential speedup yielded by PDES. This paper proposes various optimization techniques to address three major concerns in achieving efficient parallel execution of wireless network simulation: i.e., (1) reducing communication and computation overhead of simulating signal propagation across multiple logical processes; (2) reducing synchronization overhead among logical processes; (3) minimizing event scheduling overhead within individual logical processes. These techniques have been implemented in a parallel version of GloMoSim and QualNet. The experimental results with mobile ad hoc networking scenarios demonstrate that the proposed optimization techniques can improve the performance of parallel wireless network simulation by up to an order of magnitude.