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CONMan: A Step towards Network Manageability

Author
Ballani, Hitesh; Francis, Paul
Abstract
Networks are hard to manage and in spite of all the so called holistic management packages, things are getting worse. Further, there is a general lack of research on fundamentals and an increasing reliance on temporary ?bandaids?. We argue that the difficulty of network management can partly be attributed to a fundamental flaw in the existing architecture: protocols expose all their internal details and hence, the complexity of the ever-evolving data plane encumbers the management plane. Guided by this observation, in this paper we explore an alternative approach and propose Complexity Oblivious Network Management (CONMan), a network architecture in which the management interface of data-plane protocols includes minimal protocol-specific information. This restricts the operational complexity of protocols to their implementation and allows the management plane to achieve high level policies in a structured fashion. Apart from building the CONMan interface of a few protocols and a management tool that can achieve high-level configuration goals based on this interface, our preliminary experience with applying this tool to real world VPN configuration indicates the architecture?s potential to alleviate the difficulty of network management.
Date Issued
2007-04-25Publisher
Cornell University
Subject
computer science; technical report
Previously Published As
http://techreports.library.cornell.edu:8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.cis/TR2007-2079
Type
technical report