This project is part of the ongoing work at EPCC on simulation of
internetworks. It will involve the development and testing of a novel
discrete event scheduling algorithm to be implemented on the ns
simulator.
Intersim
Intersim is an ongoing project involving a collaboration with Cisco and
BT to use discrete event simulation to inform the design of IP networks.
The work is focused on modelling the design of DiffServ networks in
order to provide performance guarantees on delay, jitter and packet loss
across a network.
NS
Ns is a network simulation package developed at UC Berkeley 5 years ago.
It is largely regarded as the de-facto IP simulator within the academic
community. Part of the work with Cisco has involved the upgrading of an
existing network simulation package 'ns' to improve performance on
memory and CPU.
The Project
Last year's Intersim SSP project involved the developing beginnings of a
parallelisation of the code. The basis of the parallelisation was that
the total ordering of events did not need to be preserved, only certain
'critically related' events had to execute in the correct order. This
project will involve developing that idea to:
Develop and improved scheduler which only sorts events if they need
to be. We call this a 'Lazy Scheduler'.
Demonstrate how the Lazy Scheduler solves the bottleneck problem that
was present in the parallel scheduler.
The algorithms are essentially understood by the supervisors but
additional effort is needed to fully implement them and provide
empirical evidence that they improve ns performance. A conference
publication from this work is a strong possibility if it is
successful.
The final report for this project is available here.
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