Proceedings of the 2007 Winter Simulation Conference S. G. Henderson, B. Biller, M.-H. Hsieh, J. Shortle, J. D. Tew, and R. R. Barton, eds. APPLYING PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION TO REMOTE NETWORK EMULATION Yan Gu Richard Fujimoto College of Computing College of Computing 266 Ferst Drive, Georgia Institute of Technology 266 Ferst Drive, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, G.A. 30332-0765, U.S.A. Atlanta, G.A. 30332-0765, U.S.A. ABSTRACT Many of today’s military services and applications run on geographically distributed sites and need to be tested and evaluated under realistic scenarios with many unpredict- able factors. A remote network emulation framework called ROSENET is proposed that can meet this require- ment by using a remote parallel simulation server to model the wide area network and a local network emulator to provide timely QoS predictions for real world applications. This paper discusses problems faced in applying parallel and distributed simulation technique for the remote net- work emulation. The experimental results show that time- liness and remote accessibility are main concerns in apply- ing parallel simulation to remote network emulation. 1 INTRODUCTION As modern military operations are becoming increasingly reliant on network communication and connectivity, the importance of network centric warfare continues to grow in today’s modern warfare. A typical military communication scenario involves heterogeneously interconnected networks in a possibly hostile setting that supports a large number of users and multimedia traffic that are severe, critical, and real-time. The network design, configuration, and deploy- ment problems in such a domain are extremely challenging since military networks are usually large in scale, the net- work scenarios are often complex, the information needs to be exchanged and processed timely, and the military appli- cations are geographically distributed over a wide area net- work. Although network centric warfare has provided infor- mation superiority for modern war which translates into warfighting advantage over adversaries, information tech- nology may fail to work as expected. In one Navy SEALs mission in 1983, a soldier in Grenada had to call air sup- port from the base using commercial landlines because of failures in military communication. More recently, in the Iraq War in April 2003 (Talbot 2004), ground forces suf- fered from out of bandwidth range and software lockup problems that rendered the computer system useless. Sol- diers had to stop their vehicle to receive data on enemy po- sitions which made them easy target for enemy fire. There- fore, before deployment in an actual network environment, it is extremely important to test and evaluate these military services and applications under a wide variety of network scenarios to determine possible unexpected system behav- iors. ROSENET (Gu and Fujimoto 2004) is a remote net- work emulation system intended to test and evaluate dis- tributed services and applications, including modern mili- tary applications, by integrating remote parallel simulation servers with local network emulators. It is designed to pro- vide scale, accuracy, timeliness, flexibility, and remote ac- cessibility. Sample military applications where ROSENET may be applied include: Information Assurance in Global Information Grid. The Global Information Grid aims at integrating all of DoD’s information systems, services, and applications into a seamless, secure, and reliable information envi- ronment to achieve information superiority over ad- versaries and form the basis of network centric warfare doctrine. Tools are needed to ensure reliable delivery of critical messages, e.g., Call-for-fire messages, or medical evacuation orders. QoS in wireless networks in urban environments. Mobile applications operating in urban environments are becoming increasingly more important in military operations. People and vehicle movements, weather, terrain (e.g., high-rise buildings), are important and of- ten unpredictable factors that have strong impacts on Quality of Service (QoS) for wireless communications. ROSENET’s ability to integrate different simulators into one framework and make them accessible to re- mote users are useful features for this type of applica- tions, e.g., to provide real time analysis and control of networks. Realistic communication in military training. The need for collective and joint training is increasing as a result of the transformation to network centric 1328 1-4244-1306-0/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE