Document Open Access Logo

Automated and Precise Deterministic NetCal Calculations from Models to Bounds

Authors Wlad Pesotsky , Eric Hermsen, Steffen Bondorf

PDF

File

Thumbnail PDF
PDF
LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.6.pdf
  • Filesize: 0.85 MB
  • 19 pages

Document Identifiers

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Networks → Network performance evaluation
  • Networks → Network performance analysis
  • Networks → Network performance modeling
  • Computing methodologies → Symbolic and algebraic algorithms
  • Computing methodologies → Symbolic calculus algorithms
  • Computing methodologies → Optimization algorithms
Keywords
  • Network Calculus
  • Real-Time Systems

Metrics

Abstract

The deterministic variant of Network Calculus (NetCal, NC) enables for calculating worst-case performance guarantees in communication networks. We present the NetworkCalculus.org Deterministic Network Calculator (NCorg DNC), a tool for Deterministic Network Calculus (DNC) that extends the previous DiscoDNC by significantly enhancing its capabilities for modeling and analysis of real-world applications. The tool offers a new end-to-end solution: Starting from the prevalent model of a full-duplex Ethernet-like networks with output queueing, the  NCorg DNC offers automated conversion to its DNC model as well as application of state-of-the-research DNC analysis methods to derive worst-case delay bounds. Another significant step forward are new numerical capabilities that can model and analyze, among others, discrete data arrivals as well as service.
While we enhance features and capabilities, we keep the cost in terms of tool runtimes at bay. Our numerical evaluation showcases improved performance bounding w.r.t to previous DiscoDNC results and a comparative experimental tool performance study quantifying the computational impact of the added functionality. Overall, the NCorgDNC provides a more versatile and extensible foundation for deterministic performance analysis in modern networked systems.

Cite As Get BibTex

Wlad Pesotsky, Eric Hermsen, and Steffen Bondorf. Automated and Precise Deterministic NetCal Calculations from Models to Bounds. In 38th European Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 375, pp. 6:1-6:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2026.6

Author Details

Wlad Pesotsky
  • Distributed and Networked Systems, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Eric Hermsen
  • Distributed and Networked Systems, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Steffen Bondorf
  • Distributed and Networked Systems, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Niels Magnus Buttler, Jannis Garske, and Dan Ciubuc for their code contributions that made this tool possible.

Supplementary Materials

References

  1. IEEE standard for Ethernet, amendment 10: Media access control parameters, physical layers, and management parameters for 200 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s operation. Google Scholar
  2. IEEE standard for Ethernet, amendment 7: Media access control parameters, physical layers, and management parameters for 2.5 Gb/s and 5 Gb/s operation, types 2.5 GBASE-T and 5 GBASE-T. Google Scholar
  3. IEEE standard for local area network mac (media access control) bridges. ANSI/IEEE Std 802.1D, 1998 Edition, pages 1-373, 1998. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEESTD.1998.95619.
  4. Luca Bisti, Luciano Lenzini, Enzo Mingozzi, and Giovanni Stea. Estimating the worst-case delay in FIFO tandems using network calculus. In 3rd International ICST Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, ValueTools '08, Brussels, BEL, 2008. ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering). URL: https://doi.org/10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2008.4388.
  5. Luca Bisti, Luciano Lenzini, Enzo Mingozzi, and Giovanni Stea. Numerical analysis of worst-case end-to-end delay bounds in FIFO tandem networks. Real-Time Syst., 48(5):527-569, September 2012. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-012-9153-1.
  6. Steffen Bondorf, Paul Nikolaus, and Jens B. Schmitt. Quality and cost of deterministic network calculus: Design and evaluation of an accurate and fast analysis. In Bruce E. Hajek, Sewoong Oh, Augustin Chaintreau, Leana Golubchik, and Zhi-Li Zhang, editors, Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGMETRICS / International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, June 05 - 09, 2017, page 65. ACM, 2017. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3078505.3078594.
  7. Steffen Bondorf and Jens B. Schmitt. The DiscoDNC v2 - a comprehensive tool for deterministic network calculus. In Proc. of the International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, ValueTools '14, pages 44-49, December 2014. URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2747659.
  8. Anne Bouillard. Trade-off between accuracy and tractability of network calculus in FIFO networks. Performance Evaluation, 153:102250, 2022. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peva.2021.102250.
  9. Anne Bouillard and Éric Thierry. An Algorithmic Toolbox for Network Calculus. Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, 18, March 2008. Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10626-007-0028-x.
  10. Marc Boyer and Christian Fraboul. Tightening end to end delay upper bound for afdx network calculus with rate latency FIFO servers using network calculus. In 2008 IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems, pages 11-20, 2008. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/WFCS.2008.4638728.
  11. Bruno Cattelan and Steffen Bondorf. Iterative design space exploration for networks requiring performance guarantees. In 2017 IEEE/AIAA 36th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), pages 1-10, 2017. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/DASC.2017.8102106.
  12. Cheng-Shang Chang. Performance Guarantees in Communication Networks. Telecommunication Networks and Computer Systems. Springer London, 2000. ISBN: 978-1-4471-1147-4 978-1-4471-0459-9. Accessed Feb. 25, 2026. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 1- 4471-0459-9.
  13. H. Charara, J.-L. Scharbarg, J. Ermont, and C. Fraboul. Methods for bounding end-to-end delays on an afdx network. In 18th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS'06), pages 10 pp.-202, 2006. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ECRTS.2006.15.
  14. A. FINZI, A. MIFDAOUI, F. FRANCES, and E. LOCHIN. Network calculus-based timing analysis of afdx networks with strict priority and tsn/bls shapers. In 2018 IEEE 13th International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems (SIES), pages 1-10, 2018. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/SIES.2018.8442080.
  15. Fabien Geyer and Steffen Bondorf. Differentiable programming & network calculus: Configuration synthesis under delay constraints, 2023. URL: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.14280.
  16. C.J. Glass and L.M. Ni. The turn model for adaptive routing. In Proceedings the 19th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, pages 278-287, 1992. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCA.1992.753324.
  17. Boudewihn R. Haverkort. Performance of Computer Communication Systems: A Model-Based Approach. Wiley, 2001. ISBN: 978-0-471-97228-0 978-0-470-84192-1. Accessed: Feb 25. 2026 [Online]. URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/0470841923.
  18. Lukas Herll and Steffen Bondorf. Non-linear programming for the network calculus analysis of FIFO feedforward networks. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, ICPE '25, pages 266-279, New York, NY, USA, 2025. Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3676151.3719360.
  19. Jörg Liebeherr. Duality of the max-plus and min-plus network calculus. Found. Trends Netw., 11(3-4):139-282, 2017. URL: https://doi.org/10.1561/1300000059.
  20. Lisa Maile, Kai-Steffen Hielscher, and Reinhard German. Network calculus results for tsn: An introduction. In 2020 Information Communication Technologies Conference (ICTC), pages 131-140, 2020. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICTC49638.2020.9123308.
  21. Radia Perlman. An algorithm for distributed computation of a spanning tree in an extended lan. Computer Communication Review - CCR, 15:44-53, September 1985. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/318951.319004.
  22. Wlad Pesotsky. NCorg DNC v3 Evaluations. Software (visited on 2026-06-19). URL: https://github.com/wlad-p/ECRTS2026-NCorgDNC-v3
    full metadata available at: https://doi.org/10.4230/artifacts.26766
  23. Wlad Pesotsky and Steffen Bondorf. NetworkCalculus.org Deterministic Network Calculator (NCorg DNC). Software, version 3.0.0. (visited on 2026-06-19). URL: https://github.com/NetCal/DNC
    full metadata available at: https://doi.org/10.4230/artifacts.26764
  24. Steffen Bondorf Philipp Schon. Towards unified tool support for real-time calculus and deterministic network calculus, 2017. URL: https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:3818901.
  25. Alexander Scheffler and Steffen Bondorf. Network calculus for bounding delays in feedforward networks of FIFO queueing systems. In Proc. of the 18th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems, QEST '21, pages 149-167, August 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85172-9_8.
  26. Alexander Scheffler, Jens B. Schmitt, and Steffen Bondorf. Searching for upper delay bounds in FIFO multiplexing feedforward networks. In the 30th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS 2022), June 2022. Google Scholar
  27. J. B. Schmitt, F. A. Zdarsky, and M. Fidler. Delay bounds under arbitrary multiplexing: When network calculus leaves you in the lurch.. In IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications, pages 1669-1677, 2008. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2008.228.
  28. Jens B. Schmitt, Frank A. Zdarsky, and Ivan Martinovic. Improving performance bounds in feed-forward networks by paying multiplexing only once. In 14th GI/ITG Conference - Measurement, Modelling and Evalutation of Computer and Communication Systems, pages 1-15, 2008. Google Scholar
  29. M.D. Schroeder, A.D. Birrell, M. Burrows, H. Murray, R.M. Needham, T.L. Rodeheffer, E.H. Satterthwaite, and C.P. Thacker. Autonet: a high-speed, self-configuring local area network using point-to-point links. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 9(8):1318-1335, 1991. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/49.105178.
  30. D. Starobinski, M. Karpovsky, and L.A. Zakrevski. Application of network calculus to general topologies using turn-prohibition. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 11(3):411-421, 2003. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2003.813040.
  31. Ludovic Thomas. Analysis of the side-effects on latency bounds of combinations of scheduling, redundancy and synchronization mechanisms in time-sensitive networks [ph.d. thesis]. l'Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace, 2022. URL: https://theses.fr/2022ESAE0041.
  32. Andrea Trasacco, Raffaele Zippo, and Giovanni Stea. Nancy.expressions: Towards a computer algebra system for deterministic network calculus. In Marco Gribaudo, Mauro Iacono, and Sahra Sedigh Sarvestani, editors, Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, pages 425-436, Cham, 2026. Springer Nature Switzerland. Google Scholar
  33. Chun-Tso Tsai, Seyed Mohammadhossein Tabatabaee, Stéphan Plassart, and Jean-Yves Le Boudec. Saihu: A common interface of worst-case delay analysis tools for time-sensitive networks. SoftwareX, 27:101882, 2024. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2024.101882.
  34. E. Wandler and L. Thiele. Real-time calculus (RTC) toolbox. Accessed: Feb 20. 2026 [Online]. URL: http://www.mpa.ethz.ch/Rtctoolbox.
  35. Luxi Zhao, Paul Pop, and Silviu S. Craciunas. Worst-case latency analysis for ieee 802.1qbv time sensitive networks using network calculus. IEEE Access, 6:41803-41815, 2018. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2858767.
  36. Boyang Zhou, Isaac Howenstine, Siraphob Limprapaipong, and Liang Cheng. A survey on network calculus tools for network infrastructure in real-time systems. IEEE Access, 8:223588-223605, 2020. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3043600.
  37. Timothy Zhu, Alexey Tumanov, Michael A. Kozuch, Mor Harchol-Balter, and Gregory R. Ganger. Prioritymeister: Tail latency qos for shared networked storage. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SOCC '14, pages 1-14, New York, NY, USA, 2014. Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2670979.2671008.
  38. Raffaele Zippo, Paul Nikolaus, and Giovanni Stea. Isospeed: Improving (min,+) Convolution by Exploiting (min,+)/(max,+) Isomorphism. In Alessandro V. Papadopoulos, editor, 35th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2023), volume 262 of Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), pages 12:1-12:24, Dagstuhl, Germany, 2023. Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik. URL: https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2023.12.
  39. Raffaele Zippo and Giovanni Stea. Nancy: An efficient parallel network calculus library. SoftwareX, 19:101178, 2022. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2022.101178.
Any Issues?
X

Feedback on the Current Page

CAPTCHA

Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted to Dagstuhl Publishing

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail
© 2023-2026 Schloss Dagstuhl – LZI GmbH Schloss Dagstuhl – LZI GmbH About DROPS Imprint Privacy Contact