Parallel Simulation Made Easy With OMNeT++

This paper reports a new parallel and distributed simulation architecture for OMNeT++, an open-source discrete event simulation environment. The primary application area of OMNeT++ is the simulation of communication networks. Support for a conservative PDES protocol (the Null Message Algorithm) and the relatively novel Ideal Simulation Protocol has been implemented. Placeholder modules, a novel way of distributing the model over several logical processes (LPs) is presented. The OMNeT++ PDES implementation has a modular and extensible architecture, allowing new synchronization protocols and new communication mechanisms to be added easily, which makes it an attractive platform for PDES research, too. We intend to use this framework to harness the computational capacity of high-performance cluster computers for modeling very large scale telecommunication networks to investigate protocol performance and rare event failure scenarios.