To All Intents and Purposes: Towards Flexible Intent Expression

Intent-based networking provides an efficient mechanism to manage complexity in network management. The paradigm allows users to express their network requirements, and an autonomic framework translates them into a network configuration. Existing efforts focus primarily on modeling connectivity intents for end-users. Nonetheless, in order to deliver autonomic behavior in network management, an intent system must support a wider range of network management processes and model human-to-human interactions, essential for network operation. Furthermore, such interactions may involve nontechnical users and require the design of novel interfaces, supporting free-text and conversational intent expression. Towards this goal, we present an intent architecture that supports novel network management intents, such as network path rerouting and applying periods of ’service protection’. The paper includes details of our prototype implementation that is capable of deploying such intents in under five seconds in a large mininet topology.