The rapid growth of link bandwidths on one hand, and the emergence of resource-constrained nodes (e.g. software routers) on the other hand, will cause network nodes to be the bottleneck in the future. Parallel processing using multi-core processors can increase the packet processing of resource-constrained nodes and alleviate the problem. However, intra-node resource contention can have a strong negative impact on the corresponding network node and, therefore, also on the overall performance of the network. Commonly used network simulators (e.g. ns-3) only offer a rather simplistic node model and do not take into account intra-node resource contention. We propose a unified and extensible approach to model intra-node resource management in resource-constrained nodes. Our model gives ability to identify and predict performance bottlenecks in networks. We have implemented our model as an extension to the network simulator ns-3. The simulation results using different case studies, show that our approach significantly outperforms the original ns-3 in terms of realistic modeling.
