Weaver Meets KANVAS: An Autonomous Closed-Loop Network Management System

Abstract

This paper proposes an autonomous network management system based on closed-loop control to deal with network failures and congestion. The proposed system is realized by collaboration of Weaver, an automated system configuration designer based on Intent-based Networking, and KANVAS (Knowledge base system in wide Area Networks with Versatility, Availability, and Scalability), a framework for collecting and utilizing network information. In the proposed system, the KANVAS system collects and analyzes network conditions, and the Weaver system plans and executes countermeasures against a failure event based on the analysis results. This paper shows two case studies. In the first case study, the proposed system can automatically recover from a service failure caused by a node failure in approximately 8.5 minutes. In the second case study, the proposed system can reroute VPN due to congestion in the underlay network in approximately 35 seconds. These results show that the proposed system can automatically recover service networks from a failure and congestion that occur on the underlay network in shorter time than that required for manual recovery.