APPLICATION OF THE RESTART/SPLITTING TECHNIQUE TO NETWORK RESILIENCE STUDIES IN NS2

摘要

Obtaining the resilience characteristics, like availability and duration of outages, of the services provided by a communication network by simulation is a challenging task. The failure to provide a service with a satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) level between two nodes in the network is a rare event and invites the use of special simulation techniques. Since the QoS is determined by the routes used and the traffic pattern, this must be accounted for. This requires a simulator far more comprehensive than those used for rare event simulations until now. The approach investigated in this paper was to apply the RESTART/Splitting technique to the well-known open source simulator Network Simulator 2 (NS2), which is capable of dealing with the required network operation and management issues. A first version simulator focusing in the application of RESTART/Splitting rather than the inclusion of all networking aspects was developed and compared with direct simulation of a realistic network. The approach proved to be feasible with a promising gain.