Network Management Game

Network management and automated configuration of large-scale networks is one of the crucial issues for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Since wrong configurations might lead to an enormous amount of customer traffic to be lost, highly experienced network administrators are typically the ones who are trusted for the management and configuration of a running ISP network. We frame the management and experimentation of a network as a "game" for training network administrators without having to risk the network operation. The interactive environment treats the trainee network administrators as players of a game and tests them with various network failures or dynamics. To prototype the concept of "network management as a game", we modified NS-2 to establish an interactive simulation engine and connected the modified engine to a graphical user interface for traffic animation and interactivity with the player. We present initial results from our game applied to a small set of players.