DECOR: DEClarative network management and OpeRation

Network management operations are complicated, tedious and error-prone, requiring significant human involvement and expert knowledge. In this paper, we first examine the fundamental components of management operations and argue that the lack of automation is due to a lack of programmability at the right level action. To address this challenge, we present DECOR, a database-oriented, declarative framework towards automated network management. DECOR models router configuration and any generic network status as relational data in a conceptually centralized database. As such, network management operations can be represented as a series of transactional database queries, which provide the benefit of atomicity, consistency and isolation. The rulebased language in DECOR provides the flexible programmability to specify and enforce network-wide management constraints, and achieve high-level task scheduling. We describe the design rationale and architecture of DECOR and present some preliminary ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CCR
• Authors: Xu Chen, Yun Mao, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, Jacobus E. van der Merwe
• Keywords: CCR 2010, Management Operations, Network Management, Network Management Operations