Towards large scale software based network routing simulation

Abstract

Software based routing simulators suffer from large simulation host requirements and are prone to slow downs because of resource limitations, as well as context switching due to user space to kernel space requests. Furthermore, hardware based simulations do not scale with the passing of time as their available resources are set at the time of manufacture. This research aims to provide a software based, scalable solution to network simulation. It aims to achieve this by a Linux kernel-based solution, through insertion of a custom kernel module. This will reduce the number of context switches by eliminating the user space context requirement, and serve to be highly compatible with any host that can run the Linux kernel. Through careful consideration in data structure choice and software component design, this routing simulator achieved results of over 7 Gbps of throughput over multiple simulated node hops on consumer hardware. Alongside this throughput, this routing simulator also brings to light scalability and the ability to instantiate and simulate networks in excess of 1 million routing nodes within 1 GB of system memory