Constructing network models from workflows

The rapid growth of the internet has spurred development of new protocols and algorithms to meet changing operational requirements such as security, multicast transport, mobile networking, policy management, and quality-of-service support. Development and evaluation of these operational tools requires answering many design questions. Building testbeds and labs is expensive, reconfiguring and sharing them are difficult, and they are relatively inflexible. Networking research increasingly depends on simulation to investigate new network design, protocol behavior, performance, and interactions. Simulation relies on network models. This paper provides an automatic method for constructing simulation models from network scenario workflows. Our experiments show that automatic construction of simulation models allows online simulation that can be adjusted dynamically and promptly.