Nancy: An efficient parallel Network Calculus library

TL;DR

Nancy is a novel open-source library that enables efficient, parallel computation of complex Network Calculus operations on arbitrary piecewise affine functions, significantly expanding the tractable problem space.

Contribution

It introduces the first open-source, parallel Network Calculus library supporting arbitrary piecewise affine functions with optimized data structures and inheritance-based algorithms.

Findings

Achieves computational efficiency through data structure optimizations.

Supports complex min-plus and max-plus algebra operations.

Enables solving previously intractable NC problems.

Abstract

This paper describes Nancy, a Network Calculus (NC) library that allows users to perform complex min-plus and max-plus algebra operations efficiently. To the best of our knowledge, Nancy is the only open-source library that implements operations working on arbitrary piecewise affine functions, as well as to implement some of them (e.g. sub-additive closure and function composition). Nancy allows researchers to compute NC results using a straightforward syntax, which matches the algebraic one. Moreover, it is designed having computational efficiency in mind: it exploits optimizations of data structures, it uses inheritance to allow for faster algorithms when they are available (e.g., for specific subclasses of functions), and it is natively parallel, thus reaping the benefit of multicore hardware. This makes it usable to solve NC problems which were previously considered beyond the realm of tractable.