Ranging from the development of new protocols to validating analytical performance metrics, network simulation is the most prevalent methodology in the field of computer network research. While the well known ns-2 toolkit has established itself as the quasi standard for network simulation, the successors are on their way. In this paper, we first survey recent contributions in the field of network simulation tools as well as related aspects such as parallel network simulation. Moreover, we present preliminary results which compare the resource demands for ns-3, JiST, SimPy and OMNeT++ by implementing the identical
simulation scenario in all these network simulation tools.