UnifiedNetManagement: Unified Network Management for Heterogeneous Edge Enterprise Network

Abstract

The data explosion over the past few years has made it necessary to connect edge networks to the more powerful cloud infrastructure. Given the heterogeneity, dis-aggregation, and varied functionalities of the edge, it makes it more challenging to monitor and manage the edge using a single control plane. This is especially relevant to Edge Enterprise Network, which spans across Edge Access Networks, Wireless Access Networks, Sensor networks etc. This data explosion at the edge has also necessitated the edge Enterprise Network to support varied functionality, causing it to comprise of multiple modules to provide best performance. This renders the edge-Network cumbersome to manage and very susceptible to faults. Consequently, the highly increasing need to embrace cloud-native technology for Edge computation has become significant for service and application providers to deploy high computation functionalities closer to end users. This motivates us to build an intelligent framework to maintain and manage Edge Enterprise Networks. In this paper, we present “UnifiedNetManagement”, our Hybrid Cloud solution, that integrates any edge network to the cloud using an event-driven Workflow Manager to provide monitoring, scheduling, and troubleshooting capabilities for a smart edge network management system. We observe close to 2x performance improvement over traditional disaggregated network management.