SeaNet -- Towards A Knowledge Graph Based Autonomic Management of Software Defined Networks

Automatic network management driven by Artificial Intelligent technologies has been heatedly discussed over decades. However, current reports mainly focus on theoretic proposals and architecture designs, works on practical implementations on real-life networks are yet to appear. This paper proposes our effort toward the implementation of knowledge graph driven approach for autonomic network management in software defined networks (SDNs), termed as SeaNet. Driven by the ToCo ontology, SeaNet is reprogrammed based on Mininet (a SDN emulator). It consists three core components, a knowledge graph generator, a SPARQL engine, and a network management API. The knowledge graph generator represents the knowledge in the telecommunication network management tasks into formally represented ontology driven model. Expert experience and network management rules can be formalized into knowledge graph and by automatically inferenced by SPARQL engine, Network management API is able to packet technology-specific details and expose technology-independent interfaces to users. The Experiments are carried out to evaluate proposed work by comparing with a commercial SDN controller Ryu implemented by the same language Python. The evaluation results show that SeaNet is considerably faster in most circumstances than Ryu and the SeaNet code is significantly more compact. Benefit from RDF reasoning, SeaNet is able to achieve O(1) time complexity on different scales of the knowledge graph while the traditional database can achieve O(nlogn) at its best. With the developed network management API, SeaNet enables researchers to develop semantic-intelligent applications on their own SDNs.