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Quanta: Scaling Packet-Level Network Simulation by Exploiting Execution Redundancy

Aug 2026 · Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking · pp. 315-317 · 0 citations · 16 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

Quanta is presented, a redundancy-aware simulation framework that eliminates repeated execution in packet-level simulation and reduces the dependence of simulation cost on physical network scale.

Abstract

Packet-level network simulation provides high-fidelity modeling but suffers from severe scalability bottlenecks. Existing scaling approaches remain inefficient for modern data-center and AI-training networks. Spatial parallelism requires substantial hardware resources, while temporal-skipping approaches become less effective under bursty traffic. We observe that homogeneous data-center deployments introduce substantial execution redundancy during simulation. This paper presents Quanta, a redundancy-aware simulation framework that eliminates repeated execution in packet-level simulation. Quanta reduces the dependence of simulation cost on physical network scale. Our evaluation shows that Quanta accelerates large-scale simulations by up to 90 × , synergizes with parallel execution for a 320 × combined speedup.

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