A NEAT way to test-driven network management

Fantom, Will and Alcock, Paul and Simms, Ben and Rotsos, Charalampos and Race, Nicholas (2022) A NEAT way to test-driven network management. In: IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium :. IEEE, Budapest, Hungary. (In Press)

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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.