A trace based method for realistic simulation

International audienceThis paper proposes a new approach for making simulations realistic. This approach is based on the principle of "trace driven simulation", i.e. using results of actual traffic traces analysis in order to reproduce the same experimental conditions in simulation. The main principle of the approach proposed in this paper deals with making simulation traffic sources replay - under certain conditions - the actual traffic traces grabbed on actual networks. This paper describes the implementation of this approach in the NS simulator, and evaluates it by comparing the characteristics of traces obtained with our replay approach, with original data traces. The parameters that are considered for making the comparison are the usual traffic parameters as throughput, packet rate, etc., but also everything that is related to traffic dynamics, i.e. the second order statistical moments as autocorrelation of traffic or long range dependence