A 3N Approach to Network Control and Management

As the network technology and applications continue to evolve, computer networks become more and more important. However, network users can attack the network infrastructure (such as domain name service and routing services, etc.). The networks can not provide the minimum required quality of service for control. Network situation can not be aware in a timely manner. And network maintaining and upgrading are not easy. We argue that one root cause of these problems is that control, management and forwarding function are intertwined tightly. We advocate a complete loosing of the functionality and propose an extreme design point that we call "3N", after the architecture's three separated networks: forwarding network, control network and management network. Accordingly, we introduce four network entities: forwarder, controller, manager and separators. In the 3N architecture, the forwarding network mainly forwards packets at the behest of the control network and the management network, the control network mainly perform route computation for the data network, and the management network mainly learn about the situation of the data network and distribute policies and configurations, and the three networks working together to consist a efficient network system. In this paper we presented a high level overview of 3N architecture and some research considerations in its realization. We think the 3N architecture is helpful to improve network security, availability, manageability, scalability and so on.