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Summary: Unraveling the Complexity of Network Management
Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella
University of Wisconsin, Madison
David Maltz
Microsoft Research
Abstract
Operator interviews and anecdotal evidence suggest that
an operator's ability to manage a network decreases as
the network becomes more complex. However, there is
currently no way to systematically quantify how com-
plex a network's design is nor how complexity may im-
pact network management activities. In this paper, we
develop a suite of complexity models that describe the
routing design and configuration of a network in a suc-
cinct fashion, abstracting away details of the underlying
configuration languages. Our models, and the complex-
ity metrics arising from them, capture the difficulty of
configuring control and data plane behaviors on routers.
They also measure the inherent complexity of the reach-
ability constraints that a network implements via its rout-
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