Grid computing technologies are increasingly being used to aggregate computing resources that are geographically distributed. Commercial networks are being used to connect these resources, and thus serve as a fundamental component of Grid computing. Since these Grid resources are connected over a shared infrastructure, it is essential that we consider the effects of using this shared infrastructure during simulations. In this paper, we discuss how new additions to the GridSim simulation toolkit can be used to explore network effects in Grid computing. We also investigate techniques to incorporate differentiated levels of service, background traffic and the collection of information from the network during runtime in GridSim. As a result, these features enable GridSim to realistically model Grid computing experiments. c 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.