NeTS: Medium: Collaborative research: Automatic Network Repair

现代计算机网络必须满足日益复杂的安全、可用性和性能目标，以满足用户和应用程序的多样化需求。因此，为满足这些要求而对网络进行编程已变得极具挑战性，即使对于技术高超的网络运营商也是如此。虽然以前的工作已帮助运营商生成符合策略的网络配置，但网络仍可能经历链路故障或流量激增等意外行为，这可能会导致违反策略，需要修复网络。如今，维修通常是手工完成的，而且容易出错。该项目将开发一个自下而上的框架，用于自动和有效地修复不满足特定要求的网络。在以前工作的基础上，这项研究为“零接触联网”奠定了基础，即根据操作员提供的高级目标自动管理网络的行为。这项研究的结果将使未经广泛培训的个人能够修复网络数据和控制平面，从而为提高企业、政府和个人严重依赖的网络的稳定性和安全性铺平道路。该项目建议开发一个正式框架，用于自动创建最佳网络修复并对生成的修复质量提供正式保证。具体地说，该项目将在三个方面进行研究：1)为分布式控制平面设计形式化抽象，为广泛的策略计算高质量的维修。2)为计算各种策略的高质量维修的集中控制平面设计正式抽象。3)设计和实施在出现概率事件时修复控制平面的算法(例如，为了符合交通工程政策)。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，认为值得支持。

Modern computer networks must satisfy increasingly complex security, availability, and performance objectives to meet the diverse needs of users and applications. Consequently, programming a network to satisfy these requirements has become extremely challenging, even for highly skilled network operators. While previous work has helped operators generate policy-compliant network configurations, networks can still experience unexpected behaviors such as link failures or traffic surges, which can lead to policy violations that require a repair of the network. Today, repairs are often done manually and are error-prone. This project will develop a ground-up framework for automatically and efficiently repairing networks that do not satisfy given requirements. Building on previous work, this research lays the foundation for "zero touch networking", where a network's behavior is automatically managed based on high-level objectives provided by human operators. The results of this research will enable individuals without extensive training to repair network data and control planes, thus paving the way for increased stability and security in the networks on which businesses, governments, and individuals so heavily depend.This project proposes to develop a formal framework for automatically creating optimal network repairs and for providing formal guarantees on the quality of the generated repairs. Concretely, the project will pursue research on three fronts: 1) Design formal abstractions for distributed control planes that compute high-quality repairs for a wide range of policies. 2) Design formal abstractions for centralized control planes that compute high-quality repairs for a wide range of policies. 3) Design and implement algorithms for repairing control planes in the presence of probabilistic events (e.g., to conform to traffic engineering policies).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.