A method for the production of simulation models with application to web interaction paradigms

Modern internet and web applications rely on interactions among remote host computers connected by heterogeneous networks (different LANs, gateways, WANs, MANs, etc.). Simulation modelling such networks is of great importance to the web application designer to predict, at design time, performance metrics such as the end-to-end delay between hosts, which is dramatically increased by the various mechanisms necessary to deal with heterogeneity (protocol conversion, packet fragmentation and re-assembly, flow control, etc.). On the other hand, producing a simulation model of web interactions is a non-trivial task because of the great importance of the software aspects. It is thus necessary to provide general model production guidelines which can be then tailored and applied to specific simulation languages or packages. This paper gives such general production guidelines with an example application to the production of simulation models for web interaction paradigms of client–server and mobile agent types. An example use of the models is also introduced to predict the most convenient paradigm and the best choice of the host capacities for each given network configuration