Modeling and Prediction of Software-Defined Networks Performance using Queueing Petri Nets.

Using various modeling and simulation approaches for predicting network performance requires extensive experience and involves a number of time consuming manual steps regarding each of the modeling formalisms. Descartes Network Infrastructure (DNI) is a data center network performance modeling approach that addresses this challenge by offering multiple performance models but requiring to use only a single modeling language. In this paper, we thoroughly extend DNI to support new networking paradigms like, among others, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network-Function Virtualization (NFV). Additionally, we demonstrate how SDN-based networks can be modeled using DNI and how are they transformed later into Queueing Petri Nets (QPN) using a model-to-model transformation. In the analysis of the performance prediction accuracy, we show that automatically generated QPN models represent the performance of heterogeneous SDN hardware with maximal prediction accuracy error of 12%.