A Widely Deployable Web-based Network Simulation Framework using CORBA IDL-based APIs

Arjun Cholkar & Philip Koopman

ECE Department & Institute for Complex Engineered Systems
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Published in the Proceedings of Winter Simulation Conference ’99, 5-8 December 1999, Phoenix, AZ.


Abstract

Web-based network simulation frameworks are becom-ing highly portable and extensible. However, they still lack the degree of language and platform independence required for large-scale deployment on the World Wide Web. Our approach to enabling large-scale deployment uses a set of standard CORBA-IDL based programming interfaces, a publisher-subscriber model for communica-tion, and dynamic composition of all simulation entities (simulated network hosts and links). A prototype appli-cation for testing distributed computing policies demon-strates that the CORBA components not only provide language and platform-independence, but also provide the ability for simulationists to connect objects to a third party distributed simulation. By using a uniform mes-saging approach to all simulation events, objects can be reassigned to different simulation entities without re-quiring code modifications. Dynamic loading and un-loading of objects during a simulation run supports fault simulation, simulation entity polymorphism, and gen-eration of dynamic topologies. A link-scheduling exam-ple has demonstrated that our language and platform-independent network simulation framework attains extensibility and flexibility.


Paper:

Slides from conference presentation:


koopman@cmu.edu