A flexible graphical user interface for performance modeling

Abstract

We identify three goals for the graphical user interface (GUI) of a network simulation environment: user friendliness, model reusability, and application extensibility. We address the user friendliness issue by proposing a simple yet efficient approach to setup parameters for the simulation models. We address the application extensibility issue by a two-layer GUI architecture. The two layers are loosely-coupled, and the first layer can be easily replaced (without affecting the other components of the simulation environment). We address the model reusability issue by subnetworks. Unlike most existing simulation packages where subnetwork is simply a method to group the nodes, the subnetwork construct in our approach is an integral part of the simulation environment (i.e., all operations for a basic node also apply to a subnetwork). The port concept is used to explicitly define the 1/0 relationship between a subnetwork and the outside world. Parameter dialog boxes are used to set up the parameters for a subnetwork conveniently. Finally, a simple stack mechanism is proposed to measure subnetwork-wide output statistics.