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

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 cancelation. Consequently, simulation runtimes
increase drastically which in turn hampers the development process and in-depth evaluations.
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
distributed 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 specifically 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.
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