CNS Core: Small: Towards a Knowledge Plane for Coordinating Network Policies

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There has been an increased interest in applying knowledge management concepts and methods in computer networking research. While existing work centers around network data (i.e., the state of the network), this project asks if and how knowledge management systems can handle network semantics (i.e., the meaning of the network). To understand the benefits of semantic network knowledge management, this project investigates network policy coordination. The solutions will substantially improve the predictability, flexibility, manageability, and security of network policies, offering a fresh perspective to advance the policy infrastructure for modern communication networks.The contribution of the project is to develop network knowledge plane, an orchestration infrastructure for disparate, potentially conflicting network policies that can interact in complex ways: in the first thrust, the project introduces data integrity constraints (ICs) as a unifying abstraction to lift the policies out of the network, creating a common framework for policy reasoning; next, by leveraging connections to IC maintenance, the project will develop an orchestration service for software defined networks (SDNs); finally, by leveraging connections with semantic query transformation, the project will develop a negotiation facility to coordinate policy makings by independent stakeholders of the global Internet.The results of the project will offer significant gains to areas that are the most critical challenges to policy-based networking. It will make network policies easier to understand, predicate, reuse, manage, and evolve. Moreover, the project will have broad impact for two ways: (1) the orchestration framework will be broadly applicable, facilitating the SDNs to move beyond their initial deployment, and accelerating the deployment of new policy extensions to evolve the Internet, (2) the novel use of knowledge representation and reasoning techniques in networking will open up a new research space that arranges policies around logical properties, creating an opportunity to rethink the fundamental policy issues of communication networks.The project website (https://ravel-net.org) will be maintained to disseminate the progress of the project. Specifically, supporting tools will be made open-source. Source code will also be available on the github server (https://github.com/ravel-net) with online documentation to facilitate independent validation. Networking traces and real-world dataset will be collected and made public.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.