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DECOR: DEClarative network management and OpeRation

Published: 07 January 2010 Publication History

Abstract

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 of abstraction. 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 rule-based 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 examples applying our approach to common network management tasks.

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  1. DECOR: DEClarative network management and OpeRation

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
    ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 40, Issue 1
    January 2010
    128 pages
    ISSN:0146-4833
    DOI:10.1145/1672308
    Issue’s Table of Contents

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 07 January 2010
    Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 40, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. declarative language
    2. network management

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