Network Simulation Bridge: Bridging Applications to Network Simulators

Network simulators have been widely used to test and benchmark communication networks, their protocols and services. While new simulators have been developed to account for new technologies and standards, adapting and developing existing, popular network simulators to cope with the everincreasing number and diversity of distributed applications is considerably more challenging. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the Network Simulation Bridge, or NSB for short, a simple, low-overhead pipeline consisting of a message server and client interface libraries that bridge together applications and network simulators. NSB is application-, network simulator-, and platform-agnostic and uses a "plug-and-play" approach which allows it to integrate any application frontend with any network simulator back-end. We showcase NSB by using it to integrate two different distributed applications with the OMNeT++ network simulator. Our performance evaluation confirms that NSB incurs relatively low overhead and exhibits adequate scalability. We open-source the NSB pipeline and its APIs through a publicly available repository.