A Widely Deployable Web-based Distributed Network Simulation Framework using CORBA IDL-based APIs

Web-based network simulation frameworks are becoming highly portable and extensible. However, they still lack the degree of language and platform independence required for large-scale deployment on the World Wide Web. Our approach to enabling large-scale deployment uses a set of standard CORBA-IDL based programming interfaces, a publisher-subscriber model for communication, and dynamic composition of all simulation entities (simulated network hosts and links). A prototype application for testing distributed computing policies demonstrates that the CORBA components not only provide language and platform-independence, but also provide the ability for simulationists to connect objects to a third party distributed simulation. By using a uniform messaging approach to all simulation events, objects can be reassigned to different simulation entities without requiring code modifications. Dynamic loading and unloading of objects during a simulation run supports fault simulation, simulation entity polymorphism, and generation of dynamic topologies. A link-scheduling example has demonstrated that our language and platform-independent network simulation framework attains extensibility and flexibility.