Data plane verification (DPV) can be critical in ensuring the network operates correctly. To be useful in practice, they need to be: (1) fast so as to prevent significant packet loss or security violations; (2) scalable so as to accommodate today's large-scale network architecture. Current DPV tools struggle to meet these requirements due to their centralized architecture. To be concrete, there is a bottleneck for a single-point server to perform real-time DPV tasks. Furthermore, a single-point server makes it hard to collect real-time data plane updates from every device in large-scale networks.

Accuracy anomaly detection in user-level network traffic is crucial for network security. Compared with existing models that passively detect specific anomaly classes with large labeled training samples, user-level network traffic contains sizeable new anomaly classes with few labeled samples and has an imbalance, self-similar, and data-hungry nature. Motivation on those limitations, in this paper, we propose Meta-UAD, a Meta-learning scheme for User-level network traffic Anomaly Detection. Meta-UAD uses the CICFlowMeter to extract 81 flow-level statistical features and remove some invalid ones using cumulative importance ranking. Meta-UAD adopts a meta-learning training structure and learns from the collection of K-way-M-shot classification tasks, which can use a pre-trained model to adapt any new class with few samples by few iteration steps. We evaluate our scheme on two public datasets. Compared with existing models, the results further demonstrate the superiority of Meta-UAD with 15% - 43% gains in F1-score.

With the rapid development of next-generation networks, the highly heterogeneous and dynamic nature of networks poses significant challenges for automated network management. Autonomous Network (AN), as a new network paradigm, aims to provide customers with a zero-wait, zero-touch, and zero-fault experience. AN facilitates network management through intent-driven interactions and provides on-demand resource orchestration and service scheduling. However, accurately translating user intents into commands and allocating resources on demand for services remain significant challenges for AN. Therefore, this paper proposes IAN, an intent-based AN framework guided by the Large Language Model (LLM). In the intent translation phase, IAN introduces RAG to enhance command generation quality by retrieving from manuals. In the resource allocation phase, the method utilizes LLM to analyze service characteristics, thereby guiding the training and inference of the resource allocation model to effectively distribute resources uniformly across emerging services. Experimental results demonstrate that IAN improves performance by 52.66% in intent translation tasks and increases overall gain by 33.57% in resource allocation tasks compared to other models.

Intent-Based Networking (IBN) represents an emerging network management concept that is designed to fulfill user service requirements through automation. At its core, IBN is capable of translating user intent into network policies, thereby enabling automated configuration and management. However, the application of IBN has been limited by challenges associated with automation and intelligence. The recent widespread adoption of Large Language Model (LLM) has partially mitigated these issues. Nonetheless, hardware heterogeneity and high dynamic networks remain significant challenges for IBN: (i) Devices from different vendors are challenging to manage uniformly; (ii) Aligning service demands with rapidly changing network status is difficult. To address these challenges, we propose LIT, a framework of LLM-empowered Intent Translation with manual guidance. LIT incorporates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to reference hardware manuals and enhance the generation results of LLMs. To reduce noise from retrieval results, we optimized the general RAG process. Additionally, LIT introduces MoE (Mixture of Experts) to adjust parameter values according to network status by synthesizing results from multiple expert models. Experiments demonstrate that LIT alleviates the challenges faced by IBN, achieving a 57.5% improvement in F1 score compared to the baseline.

There is an increasing interest in data plane verification, which is designed to automatically verify network correctness through directly analyzing the data plane. Recent data plane verifiers have been able to do real-time sub-millisecond per rule verification. However, we observe that in real-world networks, individual data plane updates rarely occur. On the contrary, there are always a certain number of updates generated in a short period of time, called asburst updates, due to high-level user intend or uncertain network events. When it comes to this real-life scenario, yet, the current equivalence class (EC) based methods are unable to solve themodel-wide changesproblem caused by the EC itself, which significantly slows down the verification speed of burst updates. To overcome this limitation, we present EPVerifier, a fast, scalable data plane verifier accelerating burst updates verification with edge-predicate (EP). Instead of classifying packets into ECs according to global forwarding behavior, the EPVerifier uses one EP per edge to represent all packets that can pass through. Furthermore, with EPs that clearly have localized properties, we introduce a rule type extension that does not require a change in the granularity of the network model to support ACLs and NATs that are prevalent in real devices, and obtain better-performing parallelism by dividing the verification task based on switches. Experiments on both dataset simulations and real-life deployments show that EPVerifier achieves 2-$10\times $faster data plane verification than the state-of-the-art and such advantage expand with the data plane’s complexity and update scale growth.

Intent-Based Networking (IBN) represents a novel paradigm of network automation and intelligence that has gradually been applied to network management. While the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has improved the current state of IBN, hardware heterogeneity and high network dynamics remain significant challenges. Hardware heterogeneity requires that IBN effectively manage a diverse range of devices. The high network dynamics demands that IBN align service needs with rapidly changing network resources. We propose LIT, a framework of LLM-empowered Intent Translation with manual guidance. Given the outstanding language understanding and generation capabilities of LLM, LIT utilizes it in intent translation task. To further address two prevalent problems encountered in IBN, we introduce manual guidance and Mixture of Experts (MoE). Under the guidance of the manual, LLM improves its ability to generate high-quality policies that comply with syntax. After introducing MoE, it makes fine-grained adjustments to the parameters of policies based on network status and service requirements. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that LIT considerably alleviates numerous current challenges confronted by IBN and excels in intent translation, attaining an F1 score that is$\mathbf{5 6. 7 \%}$higher than the baseline model.