Complexity Oblivious Network Management A step towards network manageability

Networks are hard to manage and in spite of all the so called holistic management packages, things are getting worse. We argue that this is an outcome of two fundamental flaws in the existing architecture: the management plane depends on the data plane and the complexity of the ever-evolving data plane encumbers the management plane. Consequently, addressing these flaws can make the network amenable to management. In this paper, we present Complexity Oblivious Network Management (CONMan), a network architecture in which the management plane does not depend on the data plane and all data plane protocols expose a generic management interface. This restricts the operational complexity of protocols to their implementation and allows the management plane to achieve high level policies in a structured fashion. Our preliminary experience with building the CONMan interface of a couple of protocols and using them for real world management tasks indicates the architecture’s potential to alleviate the management troubles of the Internet.

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