NeTS: Small: KPBase: Core of the Knowledge Plane for Network Management

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project addresses core elements of an information base, key system components of a Knowledge Plane for the future Internet. Today the Internet network management functions are decreasingly available or capable of solving our networking problems. We find a confluence of: current network management being a human based ?cottage industry? limited to individual administrative boundaries; and networks becoming increasingly more pervasive and central in users? lives. In the context of tussles among policies, there is a need for extensibility and distribution, and the necessity for controlled sharing and exchange of information, the Knowledge Plane is a proposal for a new component of the network architecture to provide self-knowledge, self-analysis, self-prediction, and self-repair as much as possible. An important component is the substrate in which information is collected, placed, made available under policy control and accessed under that same policy control. This work is taking the first step focusing on features the enable the ability to make information available, a scoping approach to allow for scalability to the size of the Internet, the ability to declare an interest in information (rendezvous), delivery of that information under policy control. There are further central aspects that are left to future work including: efficient rendezvous mechanisms, truly efficient information distribution and delivery, trust expression, and information location management. The contribution of this work is that the information base is critically important to measurement and monitoring required to insure that the future network infrastructure highly available.