Analyzing the effect of distribution to the simulation on a network of workstations

In this paper, the effect of communication networks to the distributed simu lation has been studied. A cellular network application is simulated on a n etwork of workstations, where an ordinary 10 Mbps. Ethernet LAN has been us ed as the communication network. The effect of distribution is analysed by using the well known concept of critical path analysis, which requires even t traces from real simulations and information about event processing times as well as about their mutual relationships. In order to capture the effec t of conservative synchronization, the event traces are collected from para llel simulations instead of sequential. By using event traces and execution times, critical paths are calculated for different numbers of workstations . The use of different configurations reveals the effect of distribution, a s well as the scalability of the problem in the distributed environment. Th e critical path analysis reveals that the cellular network application is q uite suitable for distributed simulation when conservative synchronization is used. Good approximations for the execution time can be achieved if the problem is suitably partitioned into different workstations.