INSpIRE: Integrated NFV-based Intent Refinement Environment

Many aspects of the management of computer networks, such as quality of service and security, must be taken into consideration to ensure that the network meets the users and clients demands. Fortunately, management solutions were developed to address these aspects, such as Intent-Based Networking (IBN). IBN is a novel networking paradigm that abstracts network configurations by allowing administrators to specify how the network should behave and not what it should do. In this paper, we introduce an IBN solution called INSpIRE (Integrated NFV-based Intent Refinement Environment). INSpIRE implements a refinement technique to translate intents into a set of configurations to perform a desired service chain in both homogeneous environments (VNFs only) and heterogeneous environments (VNFs and physical middleboxes). Our solution is capable of (i) determining the specific VNFs required to fulfill an intent, (ii) chaining these VNFs according to their dependencies, and (iii) presenting enough low-level information to network devices for posterior traffic steering. Finally, to assess the feasibility of our solution we detail a case study that reflects real-world management situations and evaluate the scalability of the refinement process.