Design and Implementation of Flow-Level Simulator for Performance Evaluation of Large Scale Networks

In this paper, we propose a flow-level simulator called FSIM (Fluid-based SIMulator) for performance evaluation of large-scale networks, and verify its effectiveness using our FSIM implementation. The notable features of our flow-level simulator FSIM are its accuracy and fast simulation execution compared with conventional flow-level simulators. For improving simulation accuracy, our flow-level simulator FSIM utilizes accurate fluid-flow models. For accelerating simulation execution speed, our flow-level simulator FSIM adopts an adaptive numerical computation algorithm for ordinary differential equations. Another notable feature of our flow-level simulator FSIM is its compatibility with the existing network performance analysis tool. In this paper, through several experiments using our FSIM implementation, we evaluate the effectiveness of our flow-level simulator FSIM in terms of simulation speed, accuracy and memory consumption. Consequently, we show that our flow-level simulator FSIM outperforms a conventional flow-level simulator; i.e., it realizes approximately 100% faster simulation with higher accuracy and less memory consumption than a conventional flow-level simulator.