The cloud and telecommunications industry is in the midst of a transition towards the edge. There is a tremendous opportunity for the research community to influence this transformation, but doing so requires understanding industry momentum, and making a concerted effort to align with that momentum. We believe there are three keys to doing this: (1) focus on the intersection of the cloud and access networks, (2) contribute to the relevant open source projects, and (3) address the challenge of operationalizing the results. The paper puts forward a concrete proposal for all three, and discusses the opportunity to influence how the Internet evolves at the edge and enable innovative edge applications.
Controlling an opaque system by reading some "dials" and setting some "knobs," without really knowing what they do, is a hazardous and fruitless endeavor, particularly at scale. What we need are transparent networks, that start at the top with a high-level intent and map all the way down, through the control plane to the data plane. If we can specify the behavior we want in software, then we can check that the system behaves as we expect. This is impossible if the implementation is opaque. We therefore need to use open-source software or write it ourselves (or both), and have mechanisms for checking actual behavior against the specified intent. With fine-grain checking (e.g., every packet, every state variable), we can build networks that are more reliable, secure, and performant. In the limit, we can build networks that run autonomously under verifiable, closed-loop control. We believe this vision, while ambitious, is finally within our reach, due to
deep programmability
across the stack, both vertically (control and data plane) and horizontally (end to end). It will emerge naturally in some networks, as network owners take control of their software and engage in open-source efforts; whereas in enterprise networks it may take longer. In 5G access networks, there is a pressing need for our community to engage, so these networks, too, can operate autonomously under verifiable, closed-loop control.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.