The Effect of Detail on Ethernet Simulation

Hussain, Alefiya and Kapoor, Aman and Heidemann, John
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Alefiya Hussain, Aman Kapoor and John Heidemann 2004. The Effect of Detail on Ethernet Simulation. Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation (Kufstein, Austria, May 2004), 97–104. [PDF]

abstract

An important question for network simulation is what level of detail is required to obtain a desired level of accuracy. While in some networks, the level of detail is an open research issue (for example, radio propagation models in wireless networks), it has long been assumed that wired networks could be accurately modeled by fairly simple queues with a bandwidth limit and propagation delay. To our knowledge this assumption has not been widely tested. In this paper we evaluate different levels of detail for an Ethernet simulation. We consider two models for Ethernet simulation; a detailed, CSMA/CD protocol based model and a more abstract model using a DropTail, shared queue. Using web traffic with two different TCP simulation models, we evaluated the accuracy of these Ethernet models as compared to testbed measurements. We observed the DropTail Ethernet model requires significantly less execution time and can accurately model performance using a bandwidth normalization factor.

reference

@inproceedings{Hussain04a,
  author = {Hussain, Alefiya and Kapoor, Aman and Heidemann, John},
  title = {The Effect of Detail on Ethernet Simulation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the  ACM Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation},
  year = {2004},
  sortdate = {2004-05-01},
  project = {ant, saman, conser},
  jsubject = {network_simulation},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {Kufstein, Austria},
  month = may,
  pages = {97--104},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {network simulation, ethernet, detail},
  otherurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ehussain/pubs/Hussain04a.pdf},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Hussain04a.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Hussain04a.pdf},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {ACM},
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  Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work
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  redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
  fee.
  }
}

copyright

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.