DECOR: DEClarative network management and OpeRation

  • Authors:
  • Xu Chen;Yun Mao;Z. Morley Mao;Jacobus Van der Merwe

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA;AT&T Labs - Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA;University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA;AT&T Labs - Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Network management operations are complicated, tedious and error-prone, requiring significant human involvement and expert knowledge. In this paper, we first examine the fundamental components of management operations and argue that the lack of automation is due to a lack of programmability at the right level of abstraction. To address this challenge, we present DECOR, a database-oriented, declarative framework towards automated network management. DECOR models router configuration and any generic network status as relational data in a conceptually centralized database. As such, network management operations can be represented as a series of transactional database queries, which provide the benefit of atomicity, consistency and isolation. The rule-based language in DECOR provides the flexible programmability to specify and enforce network-wide management constraints, and achieve high-level task scheduling. We describe the design rationale and architecture of DECOR and present some preliminary examples applying our approach to common network management tasks.