Multicast Routing Network Simulation Platform For The Design And Realization

IP multicast technology is a burgeoning domain. One obvious advantage of multicast is that network resource it needs does not increase with the number of hosts. That is why it has become a very hot area of network technology and attracted attention of many researchers in recent years. Since routing algorithms and protocols is the key factor to realize multicast technology, on which many people have put many of their efforts into, and various multicast routing protocols have been put forward.How to evaluate different multicast protocols' performance should be studied. Traditionally small scale physical experiment and theoretic calculation are always not satisfying or even not scientific. However, the network simulation technology, which has either the charaters of traditionally physical experiments or ones of theoretic calculations, can provide us a more reliable testing approaches and it has become a new technique for network research.This paper exploits a discrete-event-driven-based network simulator on multicast - Msimulator, which has a friendly interface and integrates three functions including simulating process, figure show and data analysis. This simulator can create network topology randomly. The tested routing algorithms and protocols can be selected or appended by users in this software. Via building a network model, this simulator simulates the process of network nodes joining or leaving the multicast trees, recording several parameters to test the performance of multicast routing algorithms and protocols effectively.The paper also gives a survey of multicast routing algorithms and protocols research in the world, discusses the problem of the performance evaluation of multicast routing algorithms and protocols, affirms the standards of the performance evaluation in our system, such as ACMO, ACAR, ACST etc. It mainly studies the network simulation mechanism and modeling, brings forward design for network simulator on multicast, including the algorithms of network topology generation, the model of network entities and the network simulation mechanism. It describes the implementation and application in detail. In the end, the paper gives the sumary of my work and proposes several problems which need to be studied further.