Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

UMIC Simulation Framework
Georg Kunz, Klaus Wehrle
James Gross, Mobile Network Performance Group
Discrete event-based simulation is a commonly used evaluation methodology throughout the
develop-ment process of networked systems. However, it currently faces at least two
significant challenges: First, recent advances in wireless communication technology demand
highly accurate simulation models, re-sulting in a steep increase in model complexity and
runtime requirements. Second, multi-processor com-puters constitute the de-facto default
hardware platform even for desktop systems, thus providing cheap yet powerful “private
computing clusters”. As a result, the parallelization of discrete event simulations significantly
gained importance and is therefore (again) in the focus of active research.
Model Complexity: Simulation models of wireless networks typically require a considerably
more detailed modeling of the lower network layers than models of wired networks. In
particular, the wireless channel and the physical layer demand precise models to capture the
subtle effects and interactions of advanced wireless communication technologies such as
MIMO transmissions or successive interference cancela-tion. Consequently, simulation
runtimes increase drastically which in turn hampers the development proc-ess and in-depth
evaluations.
Parallel Discrete Event Simulation: Being an active field of research for more than two
decades, parallel discrete event simulation is supported by a wide range of network simulation
frameworks. Despite this tool support, creating a parallel simulation model is still challenging
and running simulations on a distrib-uted simulation cluster is complex. At the same time, the
increasing number and speed of processing cores in today’s commodity hardware makes a
higher degree of parallelization very attractive and cost-effective for speeding up network
simulation. Nevertheless, a key challenge in parallel simulations, in particular of wireless
networks, is the efficient utilization of the available processing power.
In this project we address these challenges by developing a novel parallelization architecture
that specifi-cally focuses on the efficient simulation of wireless network simulation models on
state-of-the-art multi-core computers. We primarily investigate means of extracting a
maximum degree of parallelism from a given simulation model and schemes to achieve a
balanced work load across computing cores.
A Flexible and Versatile Software Architecture
for Modular Protocol Development and Cross-Layer Adaptation
Ismet Aktas, Klaus Wehrle
Traditional protocol stacks that usually follow the rules of ISO/OSI divide the network task
into layers and allow only the exchange of information between adjacent layers. The
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