Application of rare event techniques to trace driven simulation

This paper describes a trace driven, fast simulation approach applicable to deal with the performance evaluation of a multiplex of heterogeneous traffic streams with variable bit rate and long lived serial correlation offered routers in the Internet. A challenge with simulations of the Internet is the huge number of events that are needed for each event of interest, e.g. the loss or excessive delay of a packet. The simulation efficiency of the trace driven approach in this paper is improved by use of importance sampling to provoke constellation of traces where the loss and long delays are more likely. The approach is successfully applied to speed-up the simulation of multiplexing of heterogeneous MPEG encoded video streams.