On the Performance of a Hybrid Network Traffic Model

The authors study a hybrid network traffic model that combines a fluid-based analytical model using ordinary differential equations with the packet-oriented discrete-event simulation. The hybrid model is important to large-scale real-time network simulations, where the packet-level emulation traffic is handled by discrete events and the majority of the background traffic is described more efficiently as fluids. The authors present a simple performance analysis of this hybrid approach. They propose three techniques namely, pointer caching, update dampening, and dynamic time stepping in an implementation of the hybrid model.