Data communication networks have been experiencing tremendous growth in size, complexity, and heterogeneity over the last decade. This trend poses a significant challenge to the design of scalable performance evaluation methodologies. In this paper we propose time-stepped hybrid simulation (TSHS) to deal with the scalability issue faced by traditional packet-level discrete event simulation methods. TSHS is a framework that offers the user the flexibility to choose the simulation time scale so as to trade off the computational cost of the simulation with its fidelity. Simulation speedup is achieved by evaluating the system at coarser time-scales. The potential loss of simulation accuracy when fine-time-scale behavior is evaluated at a coarser time-scale is studied both analytically and experimentally.
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