On Designing Transport Networks With Latency Guarantees for Next-Generation Services

This article presents an open-source network simulator and digital twin focused on the analysis of latency in Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN). Our tool can estimate delay percentiles between pairs of nodes, aiming to see if the MAN can support emerging services and applications with strict latency requirements. We show that probability bounds like Vysochanskij–Petunin (VP) inequality can be used to accurately estimate latency percentiles between pairs of nodes with minimal computational effort. Theoretical results are validated with extensive simulations leveraging the simmer package, an open-source Discrete Event Simulator (DES) written in R, along with igraph for visualization of networks and shortest path calculations. Two versions of the simulator are provided as open-source on GitHub for the research community to use and build upon: One for local PC and a second one optimized to be executed in the cloud with multiple cores and massive memory.