NS3 Simulator for a Study of Data Center Networks

The increasing complexity and sophistication of the applications deployed on Data Center Network (DCN) demanded new features and greater performance from the DCN. This resulted in many designs addressing various challenges such as cost, performance, reliability, scalability, security and energy. One major challenge a designer often faces is the realization of their proposed design or realization of the existing designs for comparison. Although proto-typing is a better choice but it does have certain limitation and is very complex and expensive. Hence, Simulation is considered as an alternative to the prototyping. In this paper, we present a case study of using Network Simulator 3 (NS3) for realization of various architectures for DCN and study their performance. The information we provide includes realization of the most popular designs for DCN and tools available with NS3 to study their performance. Our effort is to make it easy for a beginner to build popular designs for DCN and study their performance using NS3.