Abstract
Location-agnostic content delivery, in-network caching, and native support for multicast, mobility, and security are key features of the novel named data networks (NDN) paradigm. NDNs are ideal for hosting content-centric next-generation applications such as Internet of things (IoT) and virtual reality. Intent-driven management is poised to enhance the performance of the offered NDN services to these applications while reducing its management complexity. This article proposes I2DN, intent-driven NDN, a novel architecture that aims at realizing the first step towards intent modeling and mapping to data-plane configurations for NDNs. In I2DN, network operators and application developers express their abstract and declarative content delivery and network service goals and constraints using uttered or written intents. The intents are classified using built-in intent templates, and a slot filling procedure identifies the semantics of the intent. We then employ Event-B machine (EBM) language modeling to represent these intents and their semantics. The resulting EBMs are then gradually refined to represent configurations at the NDN programmable data-plane. The advantages of the proposed adoption of EBM modeling are twofold. First, EBMs accurately capture the desired behavior of the network in response to the specified intents and automatically refine it into concrete configurations. Second, EBM’s formal verification property, referred to as its proof obligation, ensures that the desired properties of the network or its services, as defined by the intent, remain satisfied by the refined EBM representing the final data-plane configurations. Experimental evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed work.
Highlights
Named data networks (NDNs) [1], [2] and intent-driven networking (IDN) [3], [4] are two orthogonal research paradigms that aim at revolutionizing the current use of networks from conventional communication services into integral components of next-generation applications
IDN allows network operators and hosted application developers to describe what is required from the network at a high level of abstraction without being concerned about how these requirements should be implemented at the network data-plane [4]
The main contributions of this article can be summarized as follows: 1) We develop a general framework for the lifecycle management of intents within the context of NDNs and analyze the main challenges for its realization
Summary
Named data networks (NDNs) [1], [2] and intent-driven networking (IDN) [3], [4] are two orthogonal research paradigms that aim at revolutionizing the current use of networks from conventional communication services into integral components of next-generation applications. O. Karrakchou et al.: Mapping Intents to Programmable NDN Data-Planes via Event-B Machines forwarding it along a path to the content producer or to a nearby router that is already storing the requested contents in its cache. Network operators are envisioned to take advantage of NDN switch functionalities to offer novel per-application, per-content, or per-consumer highly customized network services such as time-sensitive delivery using prefetching and caching, semantics-based forwarding, and content encryption and decryption [6] This vision is motivated by emerging technologies, such as software-defined networks [7], that succeeded in separating the network control functionality from that of the data-plane packet forwarding process. The proposed work demonstrates how EBM modeling language and refinement tools can be used efficiently to automate the steps of intent processing, validation, and translation to correct network and domain-dependent configurations.
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