Exploiting event-level parallelism for parallel network simulation on multicore systems

This paper proposes a parallel simulation methodology to speed up network simulations on modern multicore systems. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of this approach and the performance speedups achieved under various network conditions. This methodology provides two unique and important advantages: 1) one can readily enjoy performance speedups without using an unfamiliar simulation language/library to rewrite his protocol module code for parallel simulations, and 2) one can conduct parallel simulations in the same way as when he conducts sequential simulations. We implemented this methodology and evaluated its performance speedups on the popular ns-2 network simulator. Our results show that this methodology is feasible and can provide satisfactory performance speedups under high event load conditions on wired networks.