Efficient and Accurate Ethernet Simulation

The Internet is increasingly being called upon to provide different levels of service to different applications and users. A practical problem in doing so is that although Ethernet is one of the hops for nearly all communication in the Internet, it does not provide any QoS guarantees. A natural question, therefore, is the effect of offered load on Ethernet throughput and delay. In this paper, we present several techniques for accurately and efficiently modeling the behavior of a heavily loaded Ethernet link. We first present a distributed approach to exact simulation of Ethernet. Then, we describe an efficient distributed simulation model, called Fast Ethernet Simulation, that empirically models an Ethernet link to quickly and accurately simulate it. By eliminating the implementation of CSMA/CD protocol, our approach reduces computational complexity drastically while still maintaining desirable accuracy. Performance results show that our techniques not only add very little overhead (less than 5% in our tests) to the basic cost of simulating an Ethernet link, but also closely match real-world measurements. We also present efficient techniques for compressing cumulative distributions using hyperbolic curves and for monitoring the load on a heavily loaded link. Finally, we show applications to illustrate the potential usage of the Fast Ethernet Simulation. Keyword Ethernet simulation, CSMA/CD, modeling, traffic monitoring, performance prediction.