johnh: research teaching PAPERS software other contact about

Enabling Large-scale simulations: selective abstraction approach to the study of multicast protocols

Polly Huang, Deborah Estrin, and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Due to the complexity and scale of the current Internet, large-scale simulations are an increasingly important tool to evaluate network protocol design. Parallel and distributed simulation is one appropriate approach to the simulation scalability problem, but it can require expensive hardware and have high overhead. In this study, we investigate a complimentary solution to large-scale simulation--simulation abstraction. Just as a custom simulator includes only details necessary for the task at hand, we show how a general simulator can support configurable levels of detail for different simulations. We develop two abstraction techniques, centralized computation and abstract packet distribution, to abstract network and transport layer protocols. We demonstrate these techniques in multicast simulations and derives centralized multicast and abstract multicast distribution (session multicast). We show that our abstraction techniques each help to gain one order of magnitude in performance improvement (from tens to hundreds to thousands of nodes). Although abstraction simulations are not identical to more detailed simulations, we show that in many cases these differences are small. We show that these differences result in minimal changes in the conclusions drawn from simulations in reliable multicast simulations.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, gzip'ed postscript, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Huang98a: Polly Huang, Deborah Estrin, and John Heidemann. Enabling Large-scale simulations: selective abstraction approach to the study of multicast protocols. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, pp. 241-248. Montreal, Canada, IEEE. July, 1998. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang98a.html>.

@inproceedings{Huang98a,
	author = "Polly Huang and Deborah Estrin and John Heidemann",
	title = "Enabling Large-scale simulations: selective
                         abstraction approach to the study of
                         multicast protocols",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the  International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems",
	year = "1998",
	publisher = "{IEEE}",
	address = "Montreal, Canada",
	month = "July",
	pages = "241--248",
	copyrightholder = "{IEEE}",
	keywords = "vint, simulation, abstraction, large-scale simulation",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang98a.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang98a.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang98a.pdf",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 1998 by IEEE. Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source. Libraries are permitted to photocopy beyond the limit of US copyright law, for private use of patrons, those articles in this volume that carry a code at the bottom of the first page, provided that the per-copy fee indicated in the code is paid through the Copyright Clearance Center, 27 Congress Street, Salem, MA 01970. For other copying, reprint, or republication permission, write to IEEE Copyrights Manager, IEEE Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, PO Box 1331, Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331.