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A NEAT way to test-driven network management

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Forthcoming
Publication date13/01/2022
Host publicationIEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium
Place of Publication Budapest, Hungary
PublisherIEEE
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The increasing softwarization of network infrastructures introduces an important
challenge for network configuration. On the one hand, the growth of the network
configuration space as a result of new device types and the expanding
inter-dependence of network service components, increases the network
configuration complexity. On the other hand, new service deployment
architectures lack mechanisms to validate the impact of service configuration on
network resilience. Network operators need to adopt new mechanisms to validate
and verify network configuration changes, inspired by popular Continuous
Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) mechanisms. This paper introduces
Network Emulation-based Automated Testing (NEAT), an automated testing
framework for network configuration. NEAT allows network managers to define
network topologies and tests through YAML files and run realistic network
topologies and tests. Furthermore, network managers can control the fidelity of
their network tests and bound the execution time of testing suites, as well as
exploit parallelization of modern servers to speedup test execution.