SSP Project Summary:
[EPCC home] [SSP home] [2001 projects] [2000 projects] [1999 projects] [1998 projects] [1997 projects] [1996 projects] [1995 projects] [1994 projects] [1993 projects]

Intersim Java: Extending the Network Simulator

Student

Amit Asaravala, University of California, San Diego

Supervisor

Martin Westhead, EPCC

The aim of this work is to extend the SSP project carried out by Hernani Pedroso last year: "Intersim Java: A Modular Internetwork Simulator". The project will involve adding further protocols to the existing simulator and writing a Graphical User Interface for it.

Intersim is an ongoing research project within EPCC. It involves a collaboration between EPCC and the department of computer science to build a set of simulation tools to support the complex process of Internet protocol design. The main project is currently under consideration for funding but as a precursor we are investigating some of the issues and attempting to produce proof of concept type demonstrations with SSP work.

The core of the work is a large scale microscopic internetwork simulation package, Intersim-HP, based around the HASE simulatoin environment and designed to take advantage of HPC. We also plan to build a sister application, Intersim-Java, written in Java and based on the HASE-Java simulation environment. The aim of Intersim-Java is to provide a highly portable modelling environment with a user friendly interface that will support the design and construction of simulation models that can ultimately be ported to Intersim-HP. Java is an ideal language for this purpose, its clean, object-oriented nature facilitates rapid prototyping and model reuse and discrete event simulation modelling naturally fits into an object-oriented framework. A secondary aim for the package is its potential for use as a teaching tool for network modelling.

The project has two main aims:

The second of these will form the bulk of the work. Ideally the interface will allow simulations to be constructed by dragging and dropping packet sources, packet sinks and routers etc into a workspace and then connecting them by clicking and dragging links. Double clicking on any of the objects will bring up a menu allowing the user to set parameters for that object. Once the network has been thus specified, a "make" button will produce the code to run the model.

The final report for this project is available here.
Webpage maintained by mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk