Parallel and Distributed Simulation of Wireless Mobile and Sensor Networks

Wireless systems are experiencing an explosive growth and are currently widely investigated. The analysis can be performed both analytically and simulation based. Simulation modelling and simulation processes are often adopted for the analysis of complex and dynamic systems. Systems of interest for the analysis include large scale sensor networks, multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks, hybrid wired and wireless systems. The memory and computation bottlenecks of monolithic execution units may limit the simulation model scalability and may require long time to complete the simulation based analysis of investigated systems. The adoption of Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) techniques and frameworks can be a viable solution to increase the simulation model scalability and to reduce the time required to complete the analysis. The IEEE standard for distributed simulation (High Level Architecture) has been approved, and enabled the generalized adoption of PADS frameworks. Unfortunately, the PADS techniques may suffer the distributed synchronization and communication bottlenecks of distributed execution architectures, and should take care of model partitioning and load balancing issues. Recently, some tools and languages have been proposed and implemented to assist in the parallel and distributed simulation of wireless and mobile systems, by addressing a set of common modelling assumptions that have been translated into many optimization choices. This work illustrates the state of the art and some recent solutions in this field.