NetComplex: A Complexity Metric for Networked System Designs

The systems and networking community treasures “simple” system designs, but our evaluation of system simplicity often relies more on intuition and qualitative discussion than rigorous quantitative metrics. In this paper, we develop a prototype metric that seeks to quantify the notion of algorithmic complexity in networked system design. We evaluate several networked system designs through the lens of our proposed complexity metric and demonstrate that our metric quantitatively assesses solutions in a manner compatible with informally articulated design intuition and anecdotal evidence such as real-world adoption.