Full-Life Cycle Intent-Driven Network Verification: Challenges and Approaches

TL;DR

This paper reviews and proposes a comprehensive full-life cycle verification framework for intent-driven networks, ensuring policy availability and dependability throughout the network's operational lifecycle.

Contribution

It introduces a novel end-to-end verification framework specifically designed for intent-driven networks, expanding traditional verification methods.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated on access control policies

Effective conflict detection in multi-intent scenarios

Enhanced assurance during intent conversion process

Abstract

With the human friendly declarative intent policy expression, intent-driven network can make network management and configuration autonomous without human intervention. However, the availability and dependability of these refined policies from the expressed intents should be well ensured by full-life cycle verification. Moreover, intent-driven network verification is still in its initial stage, and there is a lack of full-life cycle end-to-end verification framework. As a result, in this article, we present and review existing verification techniques, and classify them according to objective, purpose, and feedback. Furthermore, we describe intent verification as a technology that provides assurance during the intent form conversion process and propose a novel full-life cycle verification framework that expands on the concept of traditional network verification. Finally, we verify the feasibility and validity of the presented verification framework in the case of an access control policy for different network functions with multi conflict intents.