Recently, simulation has became the most effective way for analyzing and perfecting the performance of telecommunication networks. It has proven itself as the best method in the realm of education, where the hardware capabilities for practical training are often limited. A simulated network enables students to practice hands-on network programming and to understand, in a practical way, how a data communication network operates and how protocols work.Metanet is an environment that enables the programmer to write networking applications and to test them as if using an IP network with the hosts connected through Ethernet. The whole software is a multi-process application that makes use of just the resources offered by a single machine. It runs on a UNIX system and emulates hosts that also communicate through an emulated network using TCP/IP. Each layer of the hosts' operating system is designed as a separate process that will communicate with the adjacent layers using socket pairs or UDP connections. The application layer has multi-processing capability. / Department of Computer Science

Software emulation of local area and wide area networks provides an alternative method for the design of such networks and for analyzing their performance. Emulation of bridges and routers that link networks together may provide valuable information regarding network congestion, network storms and the like before putting expensive hardware into place. Such an emulation also enables students taking a networking course to develop their own client-server applications and to visualize the basic functioning of the UDP/IP and RIP protocols.This thesis builds on the emulated local area network, Metanet, created by a previous graduate student. It adds the capability of attaching routers and bridges to multiple local and non-local emulated networks so that data may be transferred between two hosts on different segments of the same LAN (via an emulated bridge) or two different networks altogether (via an emulated router). The machines running the Metanet software should support UNIX which has Berkeley's Socket interface as emulated networks on different physical machines utilize this interface for communicating. A comparison of the new networking capabilities of Metanet and other experimental systems like XINU and MINIX is researched. / Department of Computer Science

Very small aperture terminal (VSAT) networks offer a solution to the increasing demand for low-density voice and data communications. Spread Spectrum and single-channel-per-carrier (SCPC) transmission techniques work well for multiple access purposes while allowing the earth station antennas to remain small. Direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) is the simplest spread spectrum technique to use in a VSAT network, since a frequency synthesizer is not required for each terminal. This thesis examines DS-CDMA and SCPC Ku-band VSAT satellite systems for low-density (64 kbps or less) communications. It develops methods for calculating PN coding cross-correlation interference losses and satellite transponder effects, and it includes these losses in a performance analysis of 50 channel full mesh and star network architectures. It demonstrates selection of operating conditions producing optimum performance. / Master of Science