Paolo Lutterotti, a young visiting researcher at the Computer Science Department of UCLA, and Giovanni Pau have been given the "2008 Qualnet University Program award of Distinction" at the “Qualnet World 2008” for the 2008 best innovation in Network Simulation. Lutterotti and Pau’s innovative software technology allows network researchers to develop their algorithms and protocols in simulation and deploy them in a real system with virtually no additional effort.

Paolo Lutterotti and Giovanni Pau introduced “glue” software layer between the simulator and a vehicular routing protocol. The software layer is the simulative counterpart of a Medium Access Control interface in a real Operating System and masquerades the simulator - the Qualnet Network Simulator produced by Scalable Networks - in a simple network interface that is identical to the very one present in actual equipment. The new layer has been successfully used to implement a new Vehicular Routing Protocol for the Windows environment. 

This approach has two main advantages:

Using Paolo and Giovanni innovation It has been possible to test in simulation the code, using the C# language, and perform a real experiment with 10 cars without any new line of code.

Due to the increasing complexity and heterogeneous nature of modern computer networks, the use of simulation tools is acquiring definite and increasing importance for the understanding of the system dynamics and tuning to the optimum the network parameters in large-scale networks. This innovation can be used to reduce the deployment time as well as the time to market.