Narses: A Scalable Flow-Based Network Simulator

TL;DR

Narses is a scalable network simulator designed for large distributed applications, achieving significant speedups and memory efficiency while maintaining acceptable accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a new flow-based simulation approach with simplifying assumptions to efficiently simulate large-scale distributed networks.

Findings

Up to 45 times faster than ns

Uses only 28% of ns's memory

Maintains within 8% accuracy on average

Abstract

Most popular, modern network simulators, such as ns, are targeted towards simulating low-level protocol details. These existing simulators are not intended for simulating large distributed applications with many hosts and many concurrent connections over long periods of simulated time. We introduce a new simulator, Narses, targeted towards large distributed applications. The goal of Narses is to simulate and validate large applications efficiently using network models of varying levels of detail. We introduce several simplifying assumptions that allow our simulator to scale to the needs of large distributed applications while maintaining a reasonable degree of accuracy. Initial results show up to a 45 times speedup while consuming 28% of the memory used by ns. Narses maintains a reasonable degree of accuracy -- within 8% on average.