A distributed simulator for cell-relay networks developed by using Java

The design and development of a Java-based distributed simulator, using the virtual time wrap method, for ATM networks is discussed. The case needing no traditional rollbacking processing when causality is violated is analyzed. A mechanism called virtual time tunneling is then proposed to improve the simulation efficiency. Experiments showed that the speedup factor is not smaller than 4, when the simulator executes on 5 networked computers, and the time for simulating one million cells transferring is smaller than 100 s.