Building a Comprehensive Intent-Based Networking Framework: A Practical Approach from Design Concepts to Implementation

Abstract

Intent-Based Networking (IBN) is an important step towards achieving network automation. Many challenges of today’s complex network management systems can be tackled by the solutions proposed by IBN. However, although IBN has gained a lot of attention from the academic and industrial community in the second half of the last decade leading to many scientific publications and research papers, there has been little effort made on proposing a comprehensive framework for IBN, which converts system-level IBN concepts and theories into a fully featured software implementation. This paper presents such framework. Its implementation is standards-based and open-source. The framework can be used to facilitate and validate novel research ideas and test cases. The paper discusses relevant IBN design concepts and theories, how the framework’s software architecture is derived from those concepts, and the technical and implementation details on key IBN aspects and features including Intent life-cycle, Intent definition and translation, Intent orchestration, and Intent assurance using closed-loops. We also demonstrate a real intent-based use case realized by the framework in order to show and validate the proof-of-concept (PoC). The Future work of this project is also discussed.