Development of Service Assurance Techniques for Intent Based Networking

This project aims at developing a new methodology of Service Assurance Techniques for Intent Based Networking. The mismatch problem between a network service and monitoring of the network service is discussed and addressed. Objective is to reduce amount of telemetry data exported over Wide Area Network (WAN) by processing telemetry at the edge by designing and implementing novel assurance agents. Instead of telemetry compression or in-line telemetry techniques, in our research we then proposed the different approach how to increase relevancy of telemetry data by using Service Aware information/tagging which is exported by our monitoring and telemetry export agents. Current lab tests on NSO (Cisco Orchestrator) based setup prove reduction of data exported over WAN by using real-world service definitions created by Subject Matter Experts. Such service definitions are provisioned on Cisco devices (routers) automatically by service orchestrator (NSO). By applying the proposed solution, amount of telemetry data may be reduced by factor of 40, while retaining relevancy of the provided information. Such a large efficiency factor is achieved by avoiding sending general device telemetry data for processing at central location, but rather sending service specific status information from the edge. Instead of sending number raw data, we send only computed information relevant for the service status. Experimental lab setup used is leveraging real-time Model-Driven Telemetry, Physical Network Devices as well as Virtual Devices. Future work is to apply developed Service Assurance Techniques on Open-Source Platform, such as Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).