Abstract

Wireless on-the-move communications among instantly deployed communication assets, commonly referred to as mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are a central enabler in the network-centric battlefield, Homeland Security, and disaster recovery applications.  However, the operation and performance of such large scale, mobile, heterogeneous networks is substantially impacted by terrain and environmental effects that might cause dramatic changes in link capacities and hence in end-end Measures of Performance including latency, throughput and Quality of Service.    Future Force network planners will require the capability to assess and minimize connectivity and capacity shortfalls throughout a planned maneuver as part of the collaborative planning process.  In addition – and more importantly – they will have the need to rapidly re-plan the networking configuration in support of a mission.

A Communication Effects Server (CES) is a software module that can be incorporated in live, virtual, or constructive simulations to accurately and dynamically predict end-end communication system performance in real-time or substantially faster than real-time.  This tutorial will cover basic principles of operation of heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks, present a set of requirements for communication effects server for such networks, describe a set of approaches for real-time simulation of communication networks, and present results from a series of case studies in real-time and scalable simulation of mobile ad hoc networks. 

Biography

Dr. Rajive Bagrodia is founder and President of Scalable Network Technologies, Inc. and a Professor of Computer Science (on Leave) at UCLA.   He obtained a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and a Ph.D.in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr.  Bagrodia has published over a hundred research papers in refereed journals and international conferences on high performance computing, communication, and wireless networking.   He is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Systems (TOMACS) and has served on multiple Program Committees of conferences in networking and simulation.   Professor Bagrodia was selected as a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation.  He received the Best Paper Award at the 1998, 2001, and 2004 Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation.

Together with members of his research group, Dr. Bagrodia has made significant innovations in the theory and practice of performance prediction of complex, large scale computer and communication systems, particularly wireless network systems.   His research group has produced widely used simulation software including the first multi-algorithm parallel simulation environment called Maisie and its successor PARSEC (Parallel Simulation Environment for Complex Systems), as well as the GloMoSim software for network simulations.    GloMoSim was the first wireless network simulator to be used for high-fidelity simulation of a 10,000 node ad hoc network.   GloMoSim has since been commercialized as QualNet, a widely used software for scalable, real-time simulation of heterogeneous communication networks.