[e2e] paper on "Difficulties in Simulating the Internet" now available

[Vern Paxson]

The following paper is to appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
It's a revision of a previous paper titled "Why We Don't Know How to
Simulate the Internet".

		Vern & Sally


Difficulties in Simulating the Internet

Sally Floyd & Vern Paxson
AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI (ACIRI)
{floyd,vern}@aciri.org

http://www.aciri.org/vern/papers/sim-difficulty.TON.2001.ps.gz
http://www.aciri.org/vern/papers/sim-difficulty.TON.2001.pdf


Simulating how the global Internet behaves is an immensely challenging
undertaking because of the network's great heterogeneity and rapid change.
The heterogeneity ranges from the individual links that carry the network's
traffic, to the protocols that interoperate over the links, to the "mix"
of different applications used at a site, to the levels of congestion seen
on different links.  We discuss two key strategies for developing meaningful
simulations in the face of these difficulties: searching for invariants,
and judiciously exploring the simulation parameter space.  We finish with a
brief look at a collaborative effort within the research community to develop
a common network simulator.