New Frontiers in Internet Network Management

• network management 9

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~eugeneng/papers/CCR2009.pdf

• Network management represents an architectural gap in today’s Internet (FIND)

• ensuring the consistency of the vast network state
  • network devices are too often still managed one at a time rather than managed as an integral networked system, despite the fact that the correct operation of a network requires related updates to two devices to be either accepted or both rejcted with a transaction like semantics

• leveraging both static and dynamic verification, challenging issues are:

  • how to instrument, observe, and debug the network in timely and synchronized manner.
  • how could data and control plane behavior be reliably and securely monitored and reported.
  • how could a network management system automatically derive the reference correct behavior at device level
• management friendly protocols and data-plane primitives
  • there is already a huge number of existing mechanisms used in various aspects of network management. There is an acronym soup of routing, signaling, QoS and virtualization protocols. However, they must be knitted together to provide network services, and this is where innovation is needed.
  • going further, future mechanisms could also be designed to explicitly support interactions and coordinated with other mechanisms. Most of the mechanisms are designed for a specific isolated purpose. They rarely expose any programmatic interfacess.
  • today’s networks often resort to customized glue logic and hacks to integrate mechanisms that do not have explicit interfaces for interactions … configuration hacks like these are responsible for many outages, as they substantially increase the complexity of the system and make it much harder to automate network management
  • designing … considering what explicit programmatic interfaces to allow component integration to be seamless … added advantage of defining these interfaces is the potential to enhance network performance (joint optimization)

references

• 8 F. Le, G. G. Xie, D. Pei, J. Wang, and H. Zhang. Shedding light on the glue logic of the Internet routing architecture SIGCOMM 2008, local post

• 1 V. Cerf, B. Davie, A. Greenberg, S. Landau, and D. Sincoskie. FIND Observer Panel Report April, 2009 local post

• 7 T. V. Lakshman, T. Nandagopal, R. Ramjee, K. Sabnani, and T. Woo. The SoftRouter architecture. In HotNets, November 2004. local post