Scaling NS-3 DCE Experiments on Multi-Core Servers

Direct Code Execution (DCE) is an NS-3 feature that enables ordinary executable programs to run largely unmodified on the nodes in an NS-3 simulation, enabling a single protocol implementation going from simulation to real hardware. Using the same implementation in all environments reduces development effort and makes behavior and results across environments more consistent and comparable. Although DCE has been used to evaluate smaller networks and verify protocol functionality, there has been little work scaling DCE to large number of nodes in wireless experiments. In this paper, we present our experiences with porting applications to DCE and using DCE to attempt to simulate large scale MANETs. Our results show that naively applying DCE to wireless simulations on multi-core servers can result in poor performance. With some minor configuration changes, however, significant speedup can be achieved.