On Control and Data Plane Programmability for Data-Driven Networking

The soaring complexity of networks has led to more and more complex methods to manage and orchestrate efficiently the multitude of network environments. Several solutions exist, such as OpenFlow, NetConf, P4, DPDK, etc., that allow network programmability at both control and data plane level, driving innovation in many focused high-performance networked applications. However, with the increase of strict requirements in critical applications, also the networking architecture and its operations should be redesigned. In particular, recent advances in machine learning have opened new opportunities to the automation of network management, exploiting existing advances in software-defined infrastructures. We argue that the design of effective data-driven network management solutions needs to collect, merge, and process states from both data and control planes. This paper sheds light upon the benefits of utilizing such an approach to support feature extraction and data collection for network automation.