Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Count-Based Abstractions for Performance Verification of Contention Points
Amir Seyhani, University of Waterloo; Aarti Gupta and David Walker, Princeton University; Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, University of Waterloo
Networking researchers and engineers spend much of their time trying to understand the performance of contention points – network components where multiple incoming packet streams share the same outgoing link(s). Recently, researchers have developed new logical models for analyzing such contention points, but unfortunately, such models are expensive: They do not scale well as buffer capacities increase beyond 10s of packets, making it difficult or impossible to reason about real-world systems faithfully. In this paper, we develop a suite of effective, new abstractions for reasoning about buffers and their performance characteristics. We also show how to architect a performance analysis framework for contention points in a modular way so it can take advantage of a range of abstractions that trade performance off against precision. We evaluate our abstractions against a collection of benchmarks and demonstrate their scaling benefits.
View the full NSDI '26 program at usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/technical-sessions
Count-Based Abstractions for Performance Verification of Contention Points
Amir Seyhani, University of Waterloo; Aarti Gupta and David Walker, Princeton University; Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, University of Waterloo
Networking researchers and engineers spend much of their time trying to understand the performance of contention points – network components where multiple incoming packet streams share the same outgoing link(s). Recently, researchers have developed new logical models for analyzing such contention points, but unfortunately, such models are expensive: They do not scale well as buffer capacities increase beyond 10s of packets, making it difficult or impossible to reason about real-world systems faithfully. In this paper, we develop a suite of effective, new abstractions for reasoning about buffers and their performance characteristics. We also show how to architect a performance analysis framework for contention points in a modular way so it can take advantage of a range of abstractions that trade performance off against precision. We evaluate our abstractions against a collection of benchmarks and demonstrate their scaling benefits.
View the full NSDI '26 program at usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/technical-sessions
