Simulation of NASA Ames Research Center network

This paper describes a brief network simulation study of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center campus network. Presently, the Ames network has a fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) backbone. For several years FDDI has been the network technology of choice for the Ames backbone. However, the network has grown in size over the past few years and bandwidth-hungry applications have gained increasing popularity. 100 Mbit/s FDDI no longer satisfies the needs of this large campus. Two alternative technologies, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and Gigabit Ethernet are proposed to replace the FDDI for performance improvements of the Ames network. All three backbone-technologies were simulated and performance evaluated in terms of application transmission delay.