A Graph Database for a Virtualized Network Infrastructure
Pramod A. Jamkhedkar, Theodore J. Johnson, Yaron Kanza, Aman Shakil Shaikh, N.K. Shankaranarayanan, Vladislav Shkapenyuk · 2018
Modern communication networks are large, dynamic, complex, and increasingly use virtualized network infrastructure. To deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot such networks, it is essential to understand how network elements - such as servers, switches, virtual machines, and virtual network functions - are connected to one another, and to be able to discover communication paths between them. For network maintenance applications such as troubleshooting and service quality management, it is also essential to understand how connections change over time, and be able to pose time-travel queries to retrieve information about past network states. With the industry-wide move to Software Defined Networks and Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) [26][24], maintaining these inventory and topology databases becomes a critical issue.