An Internet Simulated ATM Networking Environment
25 November 1998: Due to a lack of time (and shifting research interests) I'm no longer able to support INSANE. The software will remain available via this Web page, but the mailing list has been discontinued.
2 November 1996: Sample configuration files now on Web page.
30 October 1996: Due to a minor mistake in HTML editing, the links to the new source code distribution still pointed at the old tarfiles. They've been fixed, but if you downloaded a tarfile that claimed to be "1.0a10" you probably want to grab it again.
29 October 1996: Release 1.0a11 of 29 October 1996 contains a few more enhancements and bugfixes, including compatability with newer versions of Tcl and Tk.
INSANE is a network simulator designed to test various IP-over-ATM algorithms with realistic traffic loads derived from empirical traffic measurements. INSANE's ATM protocol stack provides real-time guarantees to ATM virtual circuits by using Rate Controlled Static Priority (RCSP) queueing. ATM signalling is performed using a protocol similar to the Real-Time Channel Administration Protocol (RCAP). Internet protocols supported include large subsets of IP, TCP, and UDP. In particular, the simulated TCP implementation performs connection management, slowstart, flow and congestion control, retransmission, and fast retransmit. Various application simulators mimic the behavior of standard Internet applications to provide a realistic workload, including: telnet, ftp, WWW, real-time audio, and real-time video.
INSANE is designed to run large simulations whose results are processed off-line. It works quite well on distributed computing clusters (although simulations are all sequential processes, a large number of them can easily be run in parallel).
Although there is no graphical user interface, a (optional) Tk-based graphical simulation monitor provides an easy way to check the progress of multiple running simulation processes.
The bulk of INSANE is written in C++. Customization and simulation configuration is performed with Tcl scripts.
Some version of INSANE (not necessarily the current release) has been tested and determined to work correctly on the following hardware and software platforms:
In general, INSANE should work reasonably well on most UNIX platforms that support the development environment listed above.
INSANE's home site is http://www.kitchenlab.org/~bmah/Software/Insane/ . The latest version can always be found there. Files available are:
There are a README file and release notes for INSANE contained in the distribution. A user's manual (in PostScript) is provided with the distribution.
A list of known bugs is available on the Web site, and updated with late-breaking information.