Lightweight Automated Reasoning for Network Architectures
Authors: 
Rahul Bothra, Venkat Arun, Brighten Godfrey, Akshay Narayan, 
Ahmed SaeedAuthors Info & Claims
Rahul Bothra, Venkat Arun, Brighten Godfrey, Akshay Narayan, Ahmed SaeedAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 237 - 245
Abstract
Architecting a modern data center network is increasingly complicated. Seeking the highest performance and support for emerging workloads, network architects planning a buildout must choose from a large selection of switching components, NICs, network stacks, congestion control algorithms, routing schemes, measurement systems, virtualization software, centralized bandwidth allocators and security mechanisms, all from various vendors. Today, manual planning by human experts is time-consuming at best, and can easily result in overlooked design choices or missed complex inter-dependencies.
We propose a radical departure from typical whiteboard-and-spreadsheet planning, and ask: is it possible to reason automatically about possible network architectural designs? Such an approach is nontrivial since formal reasoning about even a single component (like routing systems) is difficult, and we seek to understand how a variety of functional components fit together. We explore the challenge through examples and propose an automated lightweight reasoning framework that models architectural complexities at a broad, but shallow, level of abstraction. Such a framework could serve as a useful design tool for network architects, for careful cross-team planning, and even to help vendors plan product features and requirements.
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Index Terms
- Lightweight Automated Reasoning for Network Architectures
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November 2024
394 pages
ISBN:9798400712722
DOI:10.1145/3696348
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Published: 18 November 2024
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