Parallel Execution of the NS-2 Sequential Simulator on a GPU

In the modern society, computer networks have become an inevitable part of the people life. As the use of computer networks drastically grows, the need for enhancing the existing network protocols and enforcing communication security increases. A wide assortment of network simulators is available and most of them share the same issues when it comes to computation time and scalability. In this paper, the authors propose an idea to alleviate these problems without the need of any special additional hardware resources or complex programming skills. Their proposal is an upgrade of the standard NS-2 simulator, based on parallel execution on the Graphic Processing Unit using OpenCL.