On credibility of simulation studies of telecommunication networks
Pawlikowski, K.; Jeong, H.-D.J.; Lee, J.-S.R.
Communications Magazine, IEEE
Volume 40, Issue 1, Jan 2002 Page(s):132 - 139
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/35.978060
Summary:In telecommunication networks, as in many other areas of science
and engineering, the proliferation of computers as research tools has
resulted in the adoption of computer simulation as the most commonly
used paradigm of scientific investigations. This, together with a
plethora of existing simulation languages and packages, has created a
popular opinion that simulation is mainly an exercise in computer
programming. In new computing environments, programming can be
minimized, or even fully replaced, by the manipulation of icons
(representing prebuilt programming objects containing basic functional
blocks of simulated systems) on a computer monitor. One can say that we
have witnessed another success of modern science and technology: the
emergence of wonderful and powerful tools for exploring and predicting
the behavior of such complex stochastic dynamic systems as
telecommunication networks. But this enthusiasm is not shared by all
researchers in this area. An opinion is spreading that one cannot rely
on the majority of the published results on performance evaluation
studies of telecommunication networks based on stochastic simulation,
since they lack credibility. Indeed, the spread of this phenomenon is so
wide that one can speak about a deep crisis of credibility. In this
article this claim is supported by the results of a survey of over 2200
publications on telecommunication networks in proceedings of IEEE
INFOCOM and such journals as IEEE Transactions on Communications,
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and Performance Evaluation Journal.
The discussion focuses on two important necessary conditions of a
credible simulation study: use of appropriate pseudo-random generators
of independent uniformly distributed numbers, and appropriate analysis
of simulation output data. Having considered their perils and pitfalls,
we formulate guidelines that, if observed, could help to ensure a basic
level of credibility of simulation studies of telecommunication networks
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