Title: Real-time network simulation support for scalable routing experiments

Authors: Yue Li, Jason Liu, Raju Rangaswami

Addresses: School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199, USA. ' School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199, USA. ' School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199, USA

Abstract: This paper describes a new software infrastructure that combines the scalability and flexibility benefits of real-time network simulation with the realism of open-source routing protocol implementations. The infrastructure seamlessly integrates the open-source XORP router implementation with a real-time large-scale network simulation engine. The design uses a novel forwarding plane offloading approach that decouples routing from forwarding and confines the more resource consuming forwarding operations inside the simulation engine to reduce I/O overhead. Experiments demonstrate superior performance of the software routing infrastructure without impairing accuracy. The infrastructure is shown to be able to support large-scale routing experiments on light-weight virtual machines.

Keywords: network simulation; real-time simulation; network emulation; open source routing protocols; large-scale routing experiments; software infrastructure; lightweight virtual machines.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2009.028627

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2009 Vol.5 No.2, pp.146 - 156

Received: 30 Apr 2008
Accepted: 13 Oct 2008
Published online: 21 Sep 2009 *

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