Recommendations for Simulating Processing Delay

[Evan Allen]

Hi everyone,

I know that ns-3 is not meant to simulate processing delay from many other posts here. Do you have any recommendations for other tools or techniques that you've seen for that?

I'd like to run an experiment where I simulate a simple network where the switches do a bit of extra processing before forwarding each packet. My goal is to find out if they can do that processing fast enough for the network to satisfy certain performance constraints (latency / throughput between various endpoints, etc.). I am also interested in how these processing delays can cause packet drops.

I've been trying to use ns-3 to make a simulation of this, but it seems that there aren't many good ways to simulate this processing delay. I know there's Simulator::Schedule, but that seems a little difficult to use (especially when passing return values around). I also see there don't seem to be many input queue implementations in the net devices (to simulate dropping if the processing is too slow).

Do you have any advice on a good way to approach this (or a better tool for this job)?

Thanks!

Evan