PARALLELIZATION OF THE SIMULATION TOOL WING-SPACE FOR THE ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS

The growing complexity and performance of modern digital communication links call for enhanced efficiency of the computer simulation software packages that are routinely used as particularly effective and flexible analysis and design tools. The relevant typical computing environment in the telecommunication design laboratories is a cluster of heterogeneous workstations connected by a local area network (LAN). In this paper, we describe how a pre-existing tool for the simulation of transmission systems is parallelized in such a way that the distributed computing power is exploited at its best. The experiment was carried out with the aid of TRACS, a programming environment for networked, heterogeneous machines and led to the development of a 'parallel execution' feature of simulation runs. Such a feature is activated by the end-user, with no further modifications to the description of the transmission system under consideration. A few results are reported on the performance boost due to parallelization with respect to the standard serial execution.