AN OBJECT-ORIENTED APPROACH TO SIMULATING LARGE COMMUNICATION-NETWORKS

The complexity of modern communication systems in terms of the number of entities, their interaction, and the resulting dynamics make an ana lytical study often impossible. Their analysis may require the experim ental study through simulation. A simulation environment for large net work infrastructures must be carefully designed since the simulator pe rformance becomes a critical issue as the model complexity increases. Our effort to design such a simulation environment was driven by the n eed to evaluate heuristic routing strategies for very large communicat ion networks through experimental studies. We have chosen to employ th e object oriented paradigm in our approach. In addition, critical issu es such as the choice of pre-scheduling versus post-scheduling and the generation of a priori service time had to be considered during the d esign. In this paper we give an overview of the design of an object or iented simulation tool for large networks and discuss some of the issu es that are pertinent to the design of a discrete event simulator for the study of complex communication infrastructures. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.