CONMan: Taking the Complexity out of Network Management

Network management is difficult, costly, and error prone, and this is becoming more so as network complexity increases. We argue that this is an outcome of two fundamental flaws in the existing architecture: the management plane depends on the data plane, and network device management interfaces are varied, complex, and constantly evolving. In this paper, we present Complexity Oblivious Network Management (CONMan), a network architecture in which the management plane does not depend on the data plane and all data plane protocols expose a simple generic management interface. This restricts the operational complexity of protocols to their implementation and allows the management plane to achieve high level policies in a structured fashion.