Simulation of network topologies - a model for OSPF

There is a deliberate need for large-scale simulation of various networking protocols in order to understand their dynamics. With a host of routing algorithms it becomes important to monitor issues like cascading failures, inter/intra-domain routing stability, and interactions of policy-based routing. There are large number of network topologies which may be setup in a big organization be it a university, corporate office etc, and it becomes important to reproduce the similar topology to reproduce and provide a solution to routing based issues. The simulation proposed in this paper is not only a faithful reproduction of the network topology but its implementation involves scant system resources. Its an interactive system wherein the algorithm runs to convert the user network into a reducible universal matrix, which in turn is used to initialize system resources for the simulation. A framework has been suggested to give an insight of the architecture of the simulator and its general mode of operation in any given network topology running any routing protocol. Implementations for this simulation model within the OSPF architecture have also been provided and suggestions for the development within the RIP architecture have been given. Results obtained using this lightweight network simulation model also underline the robustness of the system