An object oriented network simulation testbed for real time multimedia applications

Real-time multimedia applications have stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements that the existing networks are unable to provide. Development of a network architecture that is capable of supporting such applications along with the other traditional applications requires several distinct architectural components as flow specification, routing, resource reservation, admission control, packet scheduling, etc. This paper presents an extensive network simulation testbed incorporating resource reservation architecture and rate-based stream scheduler implemented using object-oriented programming (OOP) methodology in C++. The testbed offers a flexible user interface in the form of network description language (NDL) for specifying the network components, component parameters, network topology and simulation commands. The testbed is fairly easily modifiable and extendible to simulate various network environments. Using the testbed, the suitability of the resource reservation architecture and the rate-based stream scheduler in supporting real-time multimedia applications is studied by simulating a multimedia videoconferencing environment