A multilevel modeling and analysis of network-centric systems

The design, analysis and development of parallel and distributed applications on high performance Network-Centric Systems (NCS) are still very challenging tasks. Consequently, there is a great need for an integrated multilevel analysis methodology to assist in designing and analyzing the performance of both existing and proposed new network-centric systems. Currently, there are no comprehensive analysis methods that address such diverse needs. This paper presents a three-level hierarchical modeling approach for analyzing the end-to-end performance of an NCS application. The overall system is partitioned into application level, protocol level and network level. Functions at each level are modeled using queueing networks. This approach enables the designer to study system performance for different types of networks and protocols and different design strategies. In this paper we use video-on-demand as an application example to show how our approach can be used to analyze the performance of such an application.