Fast parallel simulation of SS7 telecommunication networks

Simulation of large telecommunication networks consumes a huge amount of time on sequential machines. Execution of a parallel version of the simulator on multiprocessor computers presents an opportunity to achieve faster execution. However, correct temporal sequencing of events in a parallel environment, presents new problems which do not exist in a sequential single processor implementation. Two principle approaches, the conservative and the optimistic approaches, have been developed to alleviate these problems. The authors use a variation of the conservative deadlock avoidance algorithm to build a parallel simulation of the SS7 telecommunication network. The main advantage of this algorithm is the relative simplicity of its implementation as compared to the implementation of optimistic methods. The paper presents empirical data on the performance of the simulator and demonstrates how by exploiting link reliability features of the telecommunication network, a significantly better and more stable speedup of execution is achieved