Parallel co-simulation of conventional and active networks

Discrete event simulations are widely used to study and analyze active and conventional networking architectures and protocols. Active networks must coexist and communicate with conventional networks to effectively utilize and extend the infrastructure of the Internet. Hence, large scale network simulations containing both conventional and active components should be conducted to study crucial scalability and performance issues. In this paper, a framework to enable parallel co-simulation of conventional and active networks is described. The framework integrates ANSE, a parallel active network simulation environment, with NS, a popular sequential network simulator. Object oriented techniques that completely insulate the application modules from the modifications have been employed for parallelizing NS in order to eliminate changes to the network models. This paper presents the design and implementation of the parallel co-simulation framework along with the results obtained from our co-simulation studies. Our studies indicate that parallel simulation techniques considerably reduce simulation times for even small sized network models.