Faster Network Design with Scenario Pre-filtering

Debojyoti Dutta, Ashish Goel, and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

The design and engineering of networks requires the consideration of many possible configurations (different network topologies, bandwidths, traffic and policies). Network engineers may use network simulation to evaluate changes in network configuration, but detailed, packet-level simulation of many alternatives would be extremely time consuming. This paper introduces the concept of scenario pre-filtering--rather than perform detailed simulation of each scenario, we propose to quickly evaluate (pre-filter) all scenarios in order to select only the relevant scenarios and discard those that are clearly too over- or under-provisioned. To rapidly evaluate scenarios, we have developed several new analytical techniques to quickly determine the steady-state behavior of the network with both bulk and short term TCP flows. These techniques apply to arbitrary topologies and routers that use both drop-tail and RED queuing policies. Since we are only interested in selecting the interesting scenarios for detailed simulation, the answers need only be approximate. However, we show that accuracy is typically within 10% of detailed simulation. More importantly, these techniques are 10-300x faster than detailed simulation, and, hence, pre-filtering is a promising technique to reduce the total simulation time when many scenarios must be considered.

Availability

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Reference

Dutta02d

Debojyoti Dutta, Ashish Goel, and John Heidemann. Faster Network Design with Scenario Pre-filtering. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, pp. 237-246. Fort Worth, Texas, USA, USC/Information Sciences Institute, IEEE. October, 2002. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Dutta02d.html>.

@inproceedings{Dutta02d,
	author = "Debojyoti Dutta and Ashish Goel and John Heidemann",
	title = "Faster Network Design with Scenario Pre-filtering",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the  International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems",
	year = "2002",
	publisher = "{IEEE}",
	address = "Fort Worth, Texas, USA",
	month = "October",
	pages = "237--246",
	keywords = "asim, ns-2",
	copyright = "
	Personal use of this material is permitted.  However,
	permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising
	or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works
        for resale or redistribution to servers or lists,
	or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works
	must be obtained from the IEEE.
",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Dutta02d.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Dutta02d.pdf",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Dutta02d.ps.gz",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

Copyright

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