Network Traffic Simulator 2.0: Simulating the internet traffic

The Internet consists of a global network that provides us an impressive accessibility to various services such as Word Wide Web, email and file sharing. Understanding how the Internet is built and how data are propagated between communication networks, and more precisely between each couple of two remote computers represent an interesting challenge. In this paper we present an open-source module implemented on top of Scilab that aims to provide a complete and efficient network simulator to academic and research communities. Network traffic simulator 2.0 referenced as NTS has been designed in order to simulate random traffic on a network topology according to the latest accurate data propagation models. The Internet topology is generated according to a dedicated toolbox named network topology generator 2.0 (NTG). Conventional graphs are used to describe the connectivity between network nodes. Scilab has been selected as the core environment of our network simulator. This open source scientific software package for numerical computations provides a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. Its METANET module is dedicated to graph and network. As the traffic dynamic directly depends on the manner how data packets are propagated on a network, we need to generate accurate graphs that reproduce several actual Internet topology parameters coming from real measurements. NTG aims to achieve this task. Afterwards NTS allows studying the transmission protocols effectiveness of any data connection on the generated topologies. As a matter of course, its analysis relies on the network structure where data are routed, the transmission protocols used by connections, the routing algorithms and the user demand effects.