Towards a Self-Driving Management System for the Automated Realization of Intents

Network management faces the interrelated challenges of increasing network complexity, meeting sophisticated business requirements, and being subject to human oversight. Self-driving networks possess the key properties to overcome such challenges. We present and implement a management system that addresses several elements of a self-driving network. Our system leverages intents, a policy-based paradigm and autonomic control loops. Intent-based networking allows us to formalize how an intent can be provided as input to a control loop, and how the complexities can be abstracted from the user. To realize and assure the intent, autonomic networking enables us to create Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute (MAPE) loops. Finally, we execute the control loops using a policy-based approach. We propose a policy abstraction to support requirements at different levels of abstraction, and an Application Programming Interface (API) layer to reduce management complexity from the user perspective. We propose a formal policy information model to model policies across layers of abstractions and to support simplified mapping and strong consistencies among various policy abstraction levels. We have implemented our proposal and present a proof-of-concept use-case to showcase the intent refinement.