A Policy Conflict Detection Mechanism for Intent-based Networking
Bo Li, Xiaozhi Deng, Peiming Zhang · 2023
As a new network paradigm, Intent-Based Networking (IBN) can complete network automated policy configuration according to user intent without human involvement, and adapt to network business dynamic needs and the complexity of network function deployment. In IBN, the policy conflict mainly performs linear detection in units of flow rules sent to the switch. If a conflict is detected, the flow rule will be withdrawn, otherwise it will be issued. The realization of an intent requires multiple flow rules to work together. If a single flow rule is used as the detection unit, some flow rules may be issued without the network intent taking effect. In addition, most of the existing methods detect conflict in real time without considering time constraints. However, network administrators may issue intentions to take effect delayed or periodically, so time constraints need to be considered during detection. For IBN, this paper designed three logical expressions to analyze the relationship between policies, combined with the action field to determine the type of policy conflict. Finally, whether the intention is conflicting can be determined. This method realizes the conflict detection in units of network intentions, solves the problem that the existing methods do not consider time constraints, and can effectively detect delayed intentions and periodic intentions. Experiments show that this method can effectively detect hundreds of pairs of network policies within 1s without excessive CPU consumption.