ccnSim is an extremely scalable chunk-level simulator of Information and Content Centric Networks (ICN/CCN) written in C++ under the OMNeT++ framework. It allows the simulation of forwarding and caching strategies, cache decision policies, content request model, and so on.

ccnSim features three simulation engines:

• A classic event-driven engine that allows to assess CCN performance in scenarios with large orders of magnitude for CCN content stores (up to 10^6 chunks) and Internet catalog sizes (up to 10^8 files) on off-the-shelf hardware (i.e, a PC with a fair amount of RAM).

• ModelGraft, a new hybrid modeling/simulation engine that allows for unprecedented scalability: with respect to the (highly optimized) execution times of event driven simulation in v0.3, the new technique allow simulation of much larger networks catalogs and content stores on an exiguous amount of RAM and with over 100x reduction of simulation duration.

• Finally, a novel parallel simulation engine that achieves 100x gain over ModelGraft and thus a 10000x gain over event-driven simulation! The new technique (referred to as CS-POST-MT in true) proposes to, instead of slicing nodes of the network over multiple cores, to slice independent portions of the catalog over multiple cores. In contrast to network slicing, which would incur significant MPI overhead, the new technique exhibits an ideal speedup in the number of cores, which justify the above speedups).

Parallel version: https://github.com/TeamRossi/ccnSim-0.4-Parallel

Paper: Chiocchetti, Raffaele, Rossi, Dario and Rossini, Giuseppe, “ccnSim: an Highly Scalable CCN Simulator.” In IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), June 2013.