Towards Autonomous Fine-Grained Network Management

The current Internet is largely a heterogeneous network in the sense that it is a network that is formed by many different networks owned by different identities. Its ability to work with vastly different technologies under very different circumstances in parallel certainly has brought crucial flexibility and incentives for its growth. On the other hand, its heterogeneity has also led to rigid and coarse management which makes Internet performance insufficient to support the fast growing traffic with increasingly stricter quality of service requirements. Today, with the rise of cloud computing and software-defined networking, it is now possible to move towards autonomous fine-grained network management. In this talk, we briefly examine opportunities that come from three different aspects: space (finer traffic split), time (faster network load balancing) and application (route different applications differently). We study both the idealized fine-grained network management, which sets a limit for the best possible outcome, and algorithms that take into account important practical factors to approach that limit. The talk ends with some examples of virtual network functions (VNFs) that can be built under fine-grained network management to further improve network performance.