Network time protocol simulator
Costel Aldea, Alina Aldea · Annual Conference on Computers · 2009
The clock synchronization problem in distributed system is meant to address the following issues: events generation at exact moment in time and to distribute computing for parallel and distributed algorithms. Nowadays the biggest distributed system, Internet, has the clocks synchronized based on the Network Time Protocol. This paper presents the implementation of an NTP simulator coded in Java. This simulator brings to the user the following advantages: the user has directly access to the protocol logic; trough the simulator the user see the guiding steps of the algorithm such that it understands how it works in background on the Internet or somewhere else and the user has also total control of the simulation and of the needed computing steps. Among the simulator requirements we enumerate: extensibility (the simulator can be easily extended to simulate other distributed algorithms), different configurations, undo facility implemented using memento design pattern, save and load of configurations, step by step running of simulations (the user can do an event guided simulation or time based simulation and the analyze the log files), platform independence (while it is based on Java can be run on different operating systems) etc.