Asynchronous Background Processing for accelerated simulation of wireless communication on multi-core systems

Abstract

Discrete event simulation (DES) is an important tool for the development and analysis of wireless networks. However, with increasing network size and complexity, the computational effort and simulation time increases significantly, often exponentially. This increase in response time may be critical if DES is interfacing real-time systems like Hardware in the Loop (HIL) or network emulation. It also slows down development cycles of users designing or debugging simulation models. Most popular DES software packages run single-threaded. Thus, they achieve only limited performance improvements from more modern multi-core CPUs. At the same time, existing approaches for parallel simulation of networks do not perform well on wireless systems or require complex paradigm shifts in simulation models. In this paper, we propose Asynchronous Background Processing (ABP) to accelerate the simulation of wireless communication on multi-core systems. By moving expensive computation from the main thread into asynchronous tasks computed by background threads, it accelerates the progression of events and thus reduces response time. Tasks are started as early as possible to exploit the time the main thread spends processing other events, ideally providing results before they are needed in the simulation. We showcase the application of ABP using Veins, a popular vehicular network simulator, demonstrating speedups of up to 3.5 on typical desktop platforms. We further perform an in-depth analysis using advanced profiling techniques to investigate the effectiveness of the parallelization and guide further optimizations.