The Georgia Tech Network Simulator

We introduce a new network simulation environment, developed by our research group, called the Georgia Tech Network Simulator (GTNetS). Our simulator is designed specifically to allow much larger-scale simulations than can easily be created by existing network simulation tools. The design of the simulator very closely matches the design of real network protocol stacks and hardware. Thus, anyone with a good understanding of networking in general can easily understand how the simulations are constructed. Further, our simulator is implemented completely in object-oriented C++, which leads to easy extension by users to experiment with new or modified behavior of existing simulation models. Our tool is designed from the beginning with scalability in mind, including the support for distributed simulations on a network of workstations as part of the basic design.We give an overview of the features of GTNetS, and present some preliminary scalability results we have obtained by running GTNetS on a computing cluster at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center.