Intent Translation Engine for Intent-Based Networking
draft-pedro-ite-01
| Document | Type | Active Internet-Draft (individual) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authors | Pedro Martinez-Julia , Jaehoon Paul Jeong | ||
| Last updated | 2024-03-04 | ||
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draft-pedro-ite-01
Network Management Research Group P. Martinez-Julia, Ed.
Internet-Draft NICT
Intended status: Standards Track J. Jeong, Ed.
Expires: 6 September 2024 Sungkyunkwan University
5 March 2024
Intent Translation Engine for Intent-Based Networking
draft-pedro-ite-01
Abstract
This document specifies the schemas and models required to realize
the data formats and interfaces for Intent-Based Networking (IBN).
They are needed to enable the composition of services to build a
translation engine for IBN-based network management. This intent
translation engine (called an intent translator) is an essential
function for network intents to be enforced into a target network for
the configuration and management of the network and its security.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 6 September 2024.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2024 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
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provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Intent Translation Engine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1. Iteraction Between the ITE and Network Tentants . . . . . 3
3.2. Iteraction Between the ITE and Network Management
Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.3. Iteraction Between the ITE and VIM . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.4. Iteraction Between the ITE and External Services . . . . 5
4. Implementation Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Information Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Relation to Other IETF/IRTF Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
9. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Appendix A. Changes from draft-pedro-ite-00 . . . . . . . . . . 8
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1. Introduction
The increased difficulty to define management goals and policies
enforced to networks and security has raised the definition of
Intent-Based Networking (IBN). It abstracts the definition of those
goals and policies in the form of network intents.
An intent is a declarative statement to request a configuration or
management for a network or security function [TS-28.312][TR-28.812].
It addresses more on "What" is needed (i.e., declarative statement)
to be fulfilled than "How" it should be fulfilled (i.e., imperative
statement).
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For IBN to be properly realized, it is envisioned that many
stakeholders would be involved in the translation of network intents
to particular policies and configurations. Thus, there will be many
components and services that would be composed to construct a
solution to implement network intents.
This document specifies the schemas and models required to realize
the data formats and interfaces for IBN-based network management.
They are needed to enable the composition of services to build a
translation engine for network intents, namely Intent Translation
Engine (or Intent Translator).
2. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
3. Intent Translation Engine
This document specifes the required data formats and interfaces that
MUST be implmeented by the components of an Intent Translation Engine
(ITE), that is, an Intent Translator. Therefore, this extends the
Intent Classification in [RFC9316] and drives the implementation of
the specifications REQUIRED to propertly classify network intents.
3.1. Iteraction Between the ITE and Network Tentants
The data formats required for enabling interaction between the ITE
and network tenants are as follows:
* [TF1] Schema---Resource Description Framework (RDF) ontology and
YANG model---that must be used to format intents introduced in the
ITE.
* [TF2] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used to
format declarations of intent semantics---namely, the set of
concepts, relations, and ontologies that can be present in an
intent.
The intefaces required for enabling interaction between the ITE and
network tenants are as follows:
* [TI1] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used by
a tenant or other external entity to format and transmit an intent
to the ITE.
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* [TI2] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used by
an ITE to publish---via NETCONF and others---the intent semantics
it supports. Particularly, the set of concepts, relations, and
ontologies that can be used by tenants to define input intents.
This document will also specify the minimum set of semantics that
must be supported by any ITE and discovered by the interactions
described in this section.
3.2. Iteraction Between the ITE and Network Management Systems
The data formats required for enabling interaction between the ITE
and network management systems are as follows:
* [MF1] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used by
a management system to format declarations of management
mechanisms and by an ITE to format their compositions. This
schema and model comprehends the definitions for both management
information and commands. Hence, this schema follows the
definitions of [RFC9232] to specify data formats for telemetry
transmission.
The intefaces required for enabling interaction between the ITE and
network management systems are as follows:
* [MI1] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used by
a management system to publish---via NETCONF and others---the
management mechanisms it provides for being composed to implement
policies and network services. This schema also follows the
definitions of [RFC9232] to specify telemetry interactions.
This document will also specify the minimum set of management
mechanisms that must be provided by a management system for proper
intent support.
3.3. Iteraction Between the ITE and VIM
The data formats required for enabling interaction between the ITE
and the Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) are as follows:
* [VF1] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used to
format declarations of network resources and Virtual Network
Functions (VNFs).
* [VF2] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used to
format Network Service Descriptor (NSD).
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The intefaces required for enabling interaction between the ITE and
the VIM are as follows:
* [VI1] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used by
a VIM to publish---via NETCONF and others---the network resources
and Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) it provides.
This document will also specify the minimum set of network resources
and VNFs that must be provided by a VIM for proper intent support.
3.4. Iteraction Between the ITE and External Services
The data formats required for enabling interaction between the ITE
and external services are as follows:
* [EF1] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used to
format declarations of networkintents, network resources, and
VNFs. This schema will be used by elements that will use intents
to interact with management systems, such as AINEMA
[I-D.pedro-nmrg-ai-framework], which enables the ITE with
Artificial Intelligence (AI) functions and which will express
management decisions in terms of network intents, as shown in
[TNSM-2018].
The intefaces required for enabling interaction between the ITE and
external services are as follows:
* [EI1] Schema---RDF ontology and YANG model---that must be used by
an ITE allow external agents to provide network intents and
retrieve information about available resources and VNFs.
4. Implementation Guide
This document will specify an abstract algorithm that allows an ITE
(i.e., intent translator) to obtain a set of network service
definitions and the composition of management mechanisms that
implements the required policies or rules from a set of inputs. The
ITE can translate an intent into a network policy for a target
network [I-D.jeong-nmrg-ibn-network-management-automation][I-D.yang-i
2nsf-security-policy-translation].
The inputs are:
1. The intent provided by the tenant or some external agent.
2. A set of management mechanisms -- retrieved from some management
system available.
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3. A set of VNFs and network resources -- retrieved from some VIM.
The abstract algorithm helps obtaining validated network service
definitions and management mechanism compositions which are valid for
the available instantiation infrastructure.
5. Information Model
TBD
6. Relation to Other IETF/IRTF Initiatives
TBD
7. IANA Considerations
This document does not require any IANA actions.
8. Security Considerations
As with other AI mechanisms, a major security concern for the
adoption of intelligent reasoning on external events to manage SDN/
NFV systems is that the boundaries of the control and management
planes are crossed to introduce information from outside. Such
communications MUST be highly and heavily secured since some
malfunction or explicit attacks might compromise the integrity and
execution of the controlled system (i.e., target entity) such as
router, switch, and firewall. However, it is up to implementers to
deploy the necessary countermeasures to avoid such situations. From
the design point of view, since all operations are performed within
the control and/or management planes, the security level of reasoning
solutions is inherited and thus determined by the security measures
established by the systems conforming to such planes.
9. Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by Institute of Information &
Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded
by the Korea Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT)(No. 2022-0-01015,
Development of Candidate Element Technology for Intelligent 6G Mobile
Core Network).
10. References
10.1. Normative References
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[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC9232] Song, H., Qin, F., Martinez-Julia, P., Ciavaglia, L., and
A. Wang, "Network Telemetry Framework", RFC 9232,
DOI 10.17487/RFC9232, May 2022,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9232>.
[RFC9316] Li, C., Havel, O., Olariu, A., Martinez-Julia, P., Nobre,
J., and D. Lopez, "Intent Classification", RFC 9316,
DOI 10.17487/RFC9316, October 2022,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9316>.
10.2. Informative References
[I-D.jeong-nmrg-ibn-network-management-automation]
Jeong, J. P., Ahn, Y., Kim, Y., and J. Jung-Soo, "Intent-
Based Network Management Automation in 5G Networks", Work
in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-jeong-nmrg-ibn-network-
management-automation-03, 6 November 2023,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-jeong-nmrg-
ibn-network-management-automation-03>.
[I-D.pedro-nmrg-ai-framework]
Martinez-Julia, P., Homma, S., and D. Lopez, "Artificial
Intelligence Framework for Network Management", Work in
Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-pedro-nmrg-ai-framework-
04, 21 October 2023,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-pedro-nmrg-
ai-framework-04>.
[I-D.yang-i2nsf-security-policy-translation]
Jeong, J. P., Lingga, P., and J. Yang, "Guidelines for
Security Policy Translation in Interface to Network
Security Functions", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft,
draft-yang-i2nsf-security-policy-translation-16, 7
February 2024, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/
draft-yang-i2nsf-security-policy-translation-16>.
[TNSM-2018]
P. Martinez-Julia, V. P. Kafle, and H. Harai, "Exploiting
External Events for Resource Adaptation in Virtual
Computer and Network Systems, in IEEE Transactions on
Network and Service Management. Vol. 15, n. 2, pp. 555--
566, 2018.", 2018.
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[TR-28.812]
"Study on Scenarios for Intent Driven Management Services
for Mobile Networks", Available:
https://portal.3gpp.org/desktopmodules/Specifications/
SpecificationDetails.aspx?specificationId=3553, December
2020.
[TS-28.312]
"Intent Driven Management Services for Mobile Networks",
Available:
https://portal.3gpp.org/desktopmodules/Specifications/
SpecificationDetails.aspx?specificationId=3554, September
2023.
Appendix A. Changes from draft-pedro-ite-00
The following changes are made from draft-pedro-ite-00:
* An intent is clearly defined as a declarative statement for a
specific goal for a target network with new references.
* Intent Translation Engine is also called Intent Translator.
* The contents are clarified and typos are corrected.
Authors' Addresses
Pedro Martinez-Julia (editor)
NICT
4-2-1, Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei, Tokyo
184-8795
Japan
Phone: +81 42 327 7293
Email: pedro@nict.go.jp
Jaehoon Paul Jeong (editor)
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Sungkyunkwan University
2066 Seobu-Ro, Jangan-Gu
Suwon
Gyeonggi-Do
16419
Republic of Korea
Phone: +82 31 299 4957
Email: pauljeong@skku.edu
URI: http://iotlab.skku.edu/people-jaehoon-jeong.php
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