Switch simulation in C

[khalid81]

I'm having a project to simulate the traffic happening thru a network switch fabric. I don't want to go with complicated network simulators since the learning curve is long and they have many problem.
The project is to model packet arrivals thru input ports and route them to output where queues are formed to receive those packets.
Is there any idea of how to start ? Any one faced a similar project where I can learn from his experience? I can start programming in my own but I wanted to see if anyone has similar experience and could give directions.

[Zalantos]

do you need to simulate only the arrival process or the entire network?
(i.e. do you need to write code to simulate the switch nodes?)