Conservative Parallel Simulation of ATM Networks

A new Conservative algorithm for both parallel and sequential simulation of networks is described. The technique is motivated by the construction of a high performance simulator for ATM networks. It permits very fast execution of models of ATM systems, both sequentially and in parallel. A simple analysis of the performance of the system is made. Initial performance results from parallel and sequential implementations are presented and compared with comparable results from an optimistic TimeWarp based simulator. It is shown that the conservative simulator performs well when the "density" of messages in the simulated system is high, a condition which is likely to hold in many interesting ATM scenarios.