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Building a Comprehensive Intent-Based Networking Framework: A Practical Approach from Design Concepts to Implementation

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Abstract

Intent-Based Networking (IBN) is an important step towards achieving network automation. Many challenges of today’s complex network management systems can be tackled by the solutions proposed by IBN. However, although IBN has gained a lot of attention from the academic and industrial community in the second half of the last decade leading to many scientific publications and research papers, there has been little effort made on proposing a comprehensive framework for IBN, which converts system-level IBN concepts and theories into a fully featured software implementation. This paper presents such framework. Its implementation is standards-based and open-source. The framework can be used to facilitate and validate novel research ideas and test cases. The paper discusses relevant IBN design concepts and theories, how the framework’s software architecture is derived from those concepts, and the technical and implementation details on key IBN aspects and features including Intent life-cycle, Intent definition and translation, Intent orchestration, and Intent assurance using closed-loops. We also demonstrate a real intent-based use case realized by the framework in order to show and validate the proof-of-concept (PoC). The Future work of this project is also discussed.

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Notes

  1. Although SDN now encompasses more general means of software control of network state and operation than ONF’s originally proposed OpenFlow, this definition still holds essentially true.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ottawa Research Centre, Huawei Technologies Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Henry Yu, Hesam Rahimi & Christopher Janz

  2. China Telecom Research Institute, China Telecom, Beijing, China

    Dong Wang & Zhen Li

  3. State Key Laboratory on ISN, Xidian University, Xi’an, China

    Chungang Yang

  4. SDN Research and Development, AsiaInfo Technologies, Nanjing, China

    Yehua Zhao

Authors
  1. Henry Yu
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  2. Hesam Rahimi
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  3. Christopher Janz
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  4. Dong Wang
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  5. Zhen Li
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  6. Chungang Yang
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  7. Yehua Zhao
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Contributions

HY wrote the main manuscript text and is the main architect of the IBN framework. HR and CJ wrote the majority of Sects. 1 and 2, and edited other sections. DW, ZL, CY and YZ conducted AI-based NLP research and wrote the corresponding Sect. 3.2.4. All the authors are the main code contributors to the ONAP IBN framework open source project. And all authors reviewed the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Henry Yu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Yu, H., Rahimi, H., Janz, C. et al. Building a Comprehensive Intent-Based Networking Framework: A Practical Approach from Design Concepts to Implementation. J Netw Syst Manage 32, 47 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-024-09819-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-024-09819-7

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