A cellular automata model can quickly approximate UDP and TCP network traffic

Brooks and Orr [R.R. Brooks and N. Orr, A model for mobile code using interacting automata. IEEE Trans Mobile Computing 2002, 1 (4)] present a model for analysis and simulation of mobile code systems based on cellular automata (CA) abstractions. One flaw with that article was a lack of experimental support showing that CA can model IP networks. This article presents CA models, consistent with those in the work of Brooks and Orr, that model the transport layer of IP networks. We show how these models may be generalized for more complicated network topologies. We provide quantitative results comparing the quality of our CA implementation versus the standard network modeling tool ns-2. The results from the CA model are qualitatively similar to ns-2, but the CA simulation runs significantly faster and scales better.