Large-Scale Network Parameter Configuration Using an On-Line Simulation Framework

As the Internet infrastructure grows to support a variety of services, its legacy protocols are being overloaded with new functions such as traffic engineering. Today, operators engineer such capabilities through clever, but manual parameter tuning. In this paper, the authors propose a back-end support tool for large-scale parameter configuration that is based on efficient parameter state space search techniques and on-line simulation. The framework is useful when the network protocol performance is sensitive to its parameter settings, and its performance can be reasonably modeled in simulation. In particular, the system imports the network topology, relevant protocol models and latest monitored traffic patterns into a simulation that runs on-line in a Network Operations Center (NOC).