MD-IDN: Multi-domain intent-driven networking in software-defined infrastructures

Intent-Driven Networking is recently gaining interest, with all major SDN control platforms now providing an intent Northbound Interface (NBI) as a high-level abstraction for network management. With these frameworks network operators can conveniently define “what needs to be done”, rather than “how it should be done”. Current IDN frameworks pose two main limitations that affect deployment in production grade and multi-domain networks. They are mainly concerned with a single network domain, and thus enabling end-to-end network intents over a multi-domain and large-scale setup is still a challenge. Furthermore, these frameworks do not consider any differentiation between user intents and provider intents, and a limited set of intent classes are available for both. In this paper we present MD-IDN, which provides an intent framework for the users of multi-domain cloud infrastructures. We first propose a graph-based abstraction model for user-defined intents and a generic intent compilation process. Then, we propose compilation algorithms to achieve scalability in multi-domain networks: First, user-defined intents get processed over an abstracted multi-graph of network domains and their interconnections, and a set of local intents will be generated for each of the involved domains. Afterwards, the local intents will be compiled and installed in local regions in parallel. MD-IDN is deployed as a public service in the SAVI Testbed over more than ten data centers spanning across Canada. In multi-domain environments, our experiments show that MD-IDN outperforms current practices that compile intents over a flat network topology.