FluidSim: a tool to simulate fluid models of high-speed networks

In this paper, we present a tool for the simulation of fluid models of high-speed telecommunication networks. The aim of such a simulator is to evaluate measures which cannot be obtained through standard tools in reasonable time or through analytical approaches. We follow an event-driven approach in which events are associated with rate changes in fluid flows. We show that under some loose restrictions on the sources, this suffices to efficiently simulate the evolution in time of fairly complex models. Some examples illustrate the utilization of this approach and the gain that can be observed over standard simulation tools.