Virtual Machine-Based Simulation Platform For MANET-Based Cyber Infrastructure

Abstract

In modeling and simulating complex systems such as mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) in defense communications, it is a major challenge to reconcile multiple important considerations: the rapidity of changes to the software, the difficulty of modeling the implementation-dependent behavioral effects, the need to sustain larger scenarios, and the desire for faster simulations. Here we present our approach in successfully reconciling them using a time-synchronized virtual machine(VM)-based parallel framework that accurately lifts the devices and the network communications to a virtual time plane while retaining full fidelity. At the core of our framework is a unique hypervisor scheduling engine to execute multi-core guest nodes over multi-core host nodes in an accurate, virtual time-synchronized manner. The design and development of our framework is presented, showing MANET node-wise scalability, high fidelity of software behaviors, and time-ordering accuracy. Synthetic and actual application benchmarks show the benefits of our approach, verified by theoretically correct results. The time inaccuracy of traditional emulation methods is also demonstrated. In the largest tests, we were able to perform time-synchronized simulation of 64-node full-stack, actual software MANET behaviors, hosted on a 32-core host, with full fidelity of unmodified ad-hoc routing protocols, unmodified application executables, and user-specified physical layer effects.