A Complexity Metric for Networked System Designs

The systems and networking community lays great store by“simple” system designs. Yet, our rationalization about whether a system meets this goal often relies more on intuition and qualitative discussion than rigorous quantitative metrics. In this paper, we develop a prototype metric that seeks to quantify this notion of complexity with regard to the algorithmic component of a 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.