Paper Info
Title
Software-defined network assimilation: bridging the last mile towards centralized network configuration management with NAssim
Abstract
On-boarding new devices into an existing SDN network is a pain for network operations (NetOps) teams, because much expert effort is required to bridge the gap between the configuration models of the new devices and the unified data model in the SDN controller. In this work, we present an assistant framework NAssim, to help NetOps accelerate the process of assimilating a new device into a SDN network. Our solution features a unified parser framework to parse diverse device user manuals into preliminary configuration models, a rigorous validator that confirm the correctness of the models via formal syntax analysis, model hierarchy validation and empirical data validation, and a deep-learning-based mapping algorithm that uses state-of-the-art neural language processing techniques to produce human-comprehensible recommended mapping between the validated configuration model and the one in the SDN controller. In all, NAssim liberates the NetOps from most tedious tasks by learning directly from devices' manuals to produce data models which are comprehensible by both the SDN controller and human experts. Our evaluation shows, NAssim can accelerate the assimilation process by 9.1x. In this process, we also identify and correct 243 errors in four mainstream vendors' device manuals, and release a validated and expert-curated dataset of parsed manual corpus for future research.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3544216.3544244
SIGCOMM '22: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Multi-Vendor Networks, Network Configuration Management, Software-Defined Networks
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
6
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Huangxun Chen100.34
Yukai Miao200.34
Li Chen300.34
Haifeng Sun46827.77
Hong Xu500.34
Libin Liu600.34
Gong Zhang720321.75
Wei Wang 0050827436.01