CONMan: A Step towards Network Manageability

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.