A Program Suite for Distributed Simulation of Networks in Multi-core Environments

The ns-2 simulator is one of the most popular and widely used discrete event network simulators. Its usage of the general purpose Tcl scripting language accompanied with a wide range of networking technologies allows users to easily create complex and differentiated simulation scenarios. The main limitation of ns-2 is its lack of support for multiprocessing, especially considering that the multi-core environments have recently become tools of everyday use. In this paper we (a) propose a programming approach that allows running single-model simulations simultaneously on a multi-core systems using ns-2 and (b) present a set of software tools developed following the proposed convention. In addition, we describe a lightweight software scheduler extending the use of ns-2 on ad-hoc grid systems.