NeTS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Automatic Network Repair

Colgate University, Hamilton NY

Investigators

Abstract

Part 1: Modern computer networks must satisfy increasingly complex security, availability, and performance objectives to meet the diverse needs of users and applications. Consequently, programming a network to satisfy these requirements has become extremely challenging, even for highly skilled network operators. While previous work has helped operators generate policy-compliant network configurations, networks can still experience unexpected behaviors such as link failures or traffic surges, which can lead to policy violations that require a repair of the network. Today, repairs are often done manually and are error-prone. This project will develop a ground-up framework for automatically and efficiently repairing networks that do not satisfy given requirements. Building on previous work, this research lays the foundation for "zero touch networking", where a network's behavior is automatically managed based on high-level objectives provided by human operators. The results of this research will enable individuals without extensive training to repair network data and control planes, thus paving the way for increased stability and security in the networks on which businesses, governments, and individuals so heavily depend. Part 2: This project proposes to develop a formal framework for automatically creating optimal network repairs and for providing formal guarantees on the quality of the generated repairs. Concretely, the project will pursue research on three fronts: 1) Design formal abstractions for distributed control planes that compute high-quality repairs for a wide range of policies. 2) Design formal abstractions for centralized control planes that compute high-quality repairs for a wide range of policies. 3) Design and implement algorithms for repairing control planes in the presence of probabilistic events (e.g., to conform to traffic engineering policies). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.