| Author(s): | Bernhard Hechenleitner and Karl Entacher |
| Title: | On Shortcomings of the ns-2 Random Number Generator |
| Published: | In "Proceedings of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems Modeling and Simulation Conference (CNDS 2002)", pp. 71-77, San Antonio, TX, January 2002 |
| Abstract: |
The ns-2 is a widely used network simulation tool which imple-
ments a fairly old and weak random number generator (RNG).
As the RNG component is used by a variety of other compo-
nents, it can be seen as one of the most important core com-
ponents of the ns-2. In this paper we explore weaknesses of
this RNG and demonstrate its shortcomings in context with a
simple simulation example (M/D/1) which produces severely
wrong simulation results when this RNG is used in combina-
tion with specific seeds. We incorporate the modern Mersenne
Twister RNG into the ns-2 and show how the insensitivity
of this RNG regarding to the initial seeds leads to significant
improvements in the simulation outputs and that this modern
RNG has no bad effects with respect to the performance of
random number generation.
|
| Contributor: | Michael Käsemann |
| Comment: | describes weaknesses of ns-2 RNG and compare it to Mersenne Twister |
| Download: |  |
| Last Modified: | Data: Thu Jan 23 15:20:11 2003 HTML: Wed May 5 16:25:37 2004 |