Efficient Inter-domain Quality of Service Simulation Based on Time Series Information

The Intermon project focuses on the quality of service (QoS) issues of broadband inter-domain scenarios, as it is becoming more and more important to be able to analyze these large interconnected computer networks. Besides measurement and monitoring, simulation tools are required to assess their performance. However, traditional packet based simulators can be ineffective when simulating large backbone network traffic, because they have to update their state space with the arrival of every single packet. Therefore, as part of the Intermon simulation toolkit, we have developed a simulator architecture that handles network state descriptors in an aggregate, time series form. The simulator can be used to investigate load and packet drop rates at any point in the network, or delays and jitter along a specific path. As the state descriptors can come from real world measurements done by other tools of the Intermon toolkit, the simulator can be of high value when adding new traffic to the network, or rerouting traffic in certain parts of the network. At a slight cost in accuracy, the Time Series Simulator (TSSIM) performs much more efficiently than traditional simulators