AgentJ: Enabling Java NS-2 Simulations for Large Scale Distributed Multimedia Applications

We present a framework, called AgentJ that extends the NS-2 platform to support the simulation and performance analysis of Java network applications. We particularly focus on the simulation of P2P networks and have already integrated the P2PS middleware for the simulation of super-peer networks for discovering participants in large scale Internet applications, which has a high significance for distributed multimedia applications to enable overlays for the discovery and searching across large numbers of distributed multimedia resources. AgentJ builds upon the numerous years of networking research with NS-2 and leverages the Protolib toolkit from NRL to facilitate the passing of real data between NS-2 nodes, thereby creating a platform for the simulation of content-based middleware and applications. AgentJ currently supports UDP unicast and multicast and maintains compatible programming interfaces with the standard Java network package as well as the NS-2 scripting interfaces employed for staging simulations