Simulation of Internet Transport Protocols for high bandwidth-delay networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the simulation of communication networks with high bandwidth-delay products. We use hybrid models to overcome the computational/memory barriers that packet-level simulators encounter due to the large number of packets present in the network at every instant of time. We describe a set of software tools that constructs these hybrid models for general networks. The networks to be simulated and their parameters are specified in a network description script language (NDSL) and an NDSL translator automatically generates the corresponding a model in the hybrid systems specification language modelica. We also extend our previous hybrid modeling work to several variants of TCP that appeared recently to improve TCP's poor performance in high bandwidth-delay product networks. To demonstrate the usefulness of software tools developed and the new TCP hybrid models, we discuss simulation results from Internet-2 Abilene backbone.