When the Network Twin Drifts: A Candidate-Link Sentinel for Safe OSPF Reconfiguration

Reproducibility workspace for the sole-authored manuscript by Mohammed Alabdullah.

• ORCID: 0009-0001-0826-4380
• Correspondence: m.w@sudo-gate.com
• Affiliation: Department of Network Engineering, School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Tehran, Iran
• Release: v1.0.0

Submission-ready manuscript

The canonical manuscript source in paper/main.tex and paper/sections/ is synchronized with the finalized IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM) submission version after the final independent review pass.

• Initial submission target: 9 pages in IEEE two-column format.
• paper/manuscript.pdf is rebuilt from the canonical source by GitHub Actions and is required to remain 9 pages.
• The finalized manuscript uses SLO terminology consistently, qualifies the holdout reporting, strengthens the transferable-design-pattern framing, uses the corrected February 2026 IETF draft revisions, and contains the minimized truthful AI-use acknowledgment.
• Experimental measurements, frozen-policy parameters, validation/holdout outcomes, and scientific results are unchanged.

Research question

The study asks whether a network digital twin can approve an OSPF link-cost change even when hidden operational latency on the activated link makes the resulting path violate a 50 ms service-level objective.

Main empirical result

The frozen candidate-link sentinel accepted 110 of 186 validation candidates, including 109 safe candidates, with one unsafe deployment. On the 33-sample holdout, it accepted all 19 safe candidates and rejected all 14 unsafe candidates. The holdout result is empirical; the one-sided score covered only 20 of 33 realized RTTs and does not establish nominal conformal coverage under distribution shift.

Repository layout

• paper/: finalized manuscript source, generated PDF, references, and figures.
• paper/sections/: section-level LaTeX source used by the canonical manuscript.
• lab/: Containerlab/FRRouting configurations, scripts, schedules, and frozen result records.
• processed-data/: analysis-ready Phase 3--5 datasets.
• results/: Phase 3 summaries.
• figures/: manuscript figures.
• docs/: design, provenance, correction, and traceability records.
• tools/verify_release.py: read-only verification.

Integrity constraints

Do not rerun, overwrite, or tune against the Phase 5 holdout. Do not modify lab/phase5/results/frozen_policy.json. See lab/phase5/results/frozen_hash_resolution.json.

Quick verification

python3 tools/verify_release.py

The verifier writes no experimental result files.

Public release artifacts

• Reproducibility artifact: ndt-ospf-artifact-v1.0.0.zip
• License: MIT for software and artifact files

Archived release

• Version DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21821039
• Concept DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21821038
• Source repository: https://github.com/mo-alabdullah/ndt-ospf-candidate-link-sentinel
• GitHub release: v1.0.0