Simon Knight
I am a telecommunications engineer and software researcher based in Adelaide, South Australia. My work centers on the modeling, simulation, and coordination of complex systems—bridging the gap between high-level architectural intent and technical execution.
With a background spanning engineering and economics, I focus on building tools that provide structural clarity to large-scale infrastructure. Whether I’m developing deterministic protocol simulators, high-performance graph engines, or secure multi-agent architectures, my goal is to create systems that are as understandable as they are capable.
I believe that the most effective engineering solutions come from a combination of formal research and practical implementation. Grounded in my PhD work on automated network configuration, I continue to explore how better abstractions can simplify the management of increasingly complex digital and physical networks.
Featured Work
- Network Simulator: A deterministic, tick-based simulator for validating large-scale network designs. It enables pre-deployment verification of routing protocols (OSPF, IS-IS, BGP), catching convergence and failover errors by modeling protocol-level behavior before production deployment.
- Automatic Configuration Generation: A compiler-based framework for automated network provisioning. It transforms high-level architectural intent into validated device configurations, ensuring consistency across complex, multi-vendor infrastructures through formal graph transformations.
- Network Visualization: A layout engine designed to transform dense, multi-layer topologies into clear, structured diagrams. It employs advanced algorithms to handle complex graph data, making the structure of large networks intuitive and actionable.
- Network Modeling Engine: A modern Python library for defining and querying network topologies, backed by a high-performance Rust core (NTE). It provides a type-safe API for managing network intent and generating configurations at scale.
- Brownfield Ingestion & Analysis: A framework for extracting structured intent from legacy network state. It bridges the gap between manual CLI configurations and modern automation by identifying protocol relationships and topology from unstructured data.
- Topology Zoo: A curated database of real-world network topologies from ISPs and research networks, used in academic research for network analysis and algorithm validation. Cited by over 2,000 papers.
Background
My work is grounded in a background in telecommunications engineering and economics. I completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunications with First Class Honours and a Bachelor of Economics at the University of Adelaide.
I later pursued research at the University of South Australia, where I earned a PhD in Computer Science (2017). My research focused on the abstractions and transformations required for automated network configuration, leading to the development of the AutoNetkit modeling framework.
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