Network Simulation using OPNET

Simulation Modeling is becoming an increasingly popular method for network performance analysis. We review here one such tool to understand the working and performance of a network

Friday, October 03, 2008

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Network managers and researchers design certain topologies, protocols and algorithms, the effectiveness of which can be decided by simulation. The proposed designs cannot be directly fielded with existing infrastructure without testing of compatibility with it.

The network simulator provides a test bed by simulating the real world network. A number of network simulation tools are available in the market like NS-2, GloMoSim, QualNet, NetSim, OPNET, etc.

About OPNET
OPNET is a graphical user interface (GUI) based network simulation tool which is simple to install and use. It comes with a good documentation and is available for installation on Windows.

We reviewed the OPNET IT Guru academic edition for network simulation and analysis. The user interface would be found self explanatory by those having basic knowledge of computer networking. OPNET's GUI provides an easy way to develop models for network, different hardware devices and protocols. This tool supports most of the network types and technologies like LAN, ATM, Frame Relay, WAN, Wireless Networks etc. It allows designing scenarios based on these technologies and simulating them. It also provides outputs in form of plots and simulation data.

OPNET uses a wizard to help you choose the devices you want to use in your network design.

For the purpose of simulation it provides various models of different type of network devices like hubs, bridges, switches, routers and servers from many network vendors like Cisco, Nortel, 3Com, Bay Networks, Cabletron, HP, Juniper, Lucent, NEC and many more.

It also allows to drag and drop in the workspace and use printers, workstations, different types of links like 1000BaseX, 1000BaseT, 100BaseT, 10G, Fast Ethernet, OC links, SONET etc available in its library for network designing.

Getting started
The OPNET IT Guru academic edition of the software can be freely downloaded and installed after online registration with OPNET.

The size of the setup file is 50.3 MB. During installation it requires online activation of the license.

A detailed step-wise process of installation is available at www.opnet.com/itguru-acaemic/instructions.html.

Designing network scenarios
For the purpose of demo we would be first creating a WAN with a centralized server and analyse its performance based on CPU utilization, link utilization, etc.

Object Palette displays all the models of products available in OPNET's library for the selected technologies and vendors

Start OPNET, open a new project and give a suitable name for the project and scenario. Create an empty scenario and select a suitable network scale among World, Enterprise, Campus, Office, Logical, maps. We would select 'enterprise'.

Then select the required technologies and vendors. This will lead to the display of all products related to the technology and the vendor available in OPNET's library. Drag and drop the products and links from object palette into workspace to design the network.

A generated network scenario

This way we can complete one scenario. This network can be analysed for various parameters like CPU utilisation, bandwidth utilization, throughput, etc.

Performance analysis
Performance analysis can be seen in two ways – one using plot and another through result data table. Here we generated another scenario of a similar WAN simulated above but with distributed cache servers and compared the performance of the server in these two scenarios.

A comparative graph on point to point throughput for two scenarios.

Conclusion
It was just a demo on simulation of a WAN; however there are many more simulation scenarios like load balancing, advanced web modeling, QoS is possible. By using a virtual network environment, we can simulate and diagnose difficult problems more effectively. We can change different parameters and analyse their effect on the network before it is implemented so as to enhance the performance.

A number of scenarios can be generated with respect to change of load and failure analysis can be performed. The tool gives better understanding of the working and performance of  a network.

Nirav Shah, Sumit Goswami, IIT Kharagpur

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