Design, realization and evaluation of a component-based compositional software architecture for network simulation

The Internet is undergoing a swift change in the underlying technologies in order to keep up with the surprising growth of new users and new applications. Numerous techniques have been proposed to provide better than best-effort services and to accommodate new applications. With so many techniques interacting and interfering with one another, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to derive exact, analytical models to characterize the behavior of a new protocol/algorithm and its interaction with other protocols. Consequently, networking researchers have resorted to using software-based simulation to understand/study networking problems or to assess the performance of new protocols. This thesis is to document the design and implementation of a component-based compositional network simulation environment, called JavaSim, and to report our implementation experiences and encouraging performance results.; We follow the philosophy of software engineering in developing extensible and reusable software, and first propose a component-based software architecture, called the autonomous component architecture (ACA). Second, we lay out a generalized packet-switched internetworking framework (called INET) on top of ACA and define generic network components and their contracts. The model captures the fundamental features of most networks and yet is flexible enough to accommodate various network architectures and future technology advances. Finally, we realize both ACA and INET in Java (and hence the name JavaSim).; Despite that ACA introduces run-time overheads, JavaSim shows better scalability than the ns-2 simulator and SSFNet in terms of both total simulation time and memory consumption.