DECOR: DEClarative network management and OpeRation

Network management operations are complicated, tedious and error-prone, requiring significant human involvement and expert knowledge. In this paper, we first examine the fundamental com-ponents of management operations and argue that the lack of au-tomation is due to a lack of programmability at the right level of abstraction. To address this challenge, we present DECOR, a database-oriented, declarative framework towards automated net-work management. DECOR models router configuration and any generic network status as relational data in a conceptually central-ized database. As such, network management operations can be represented as a series of transactional database queries, which pro-vide the benefit of atomicity, consistency and isolation. The rule-based language in DECOR provides the flexible programmability to specify and enforce network-wide management constraints, and achieve high-level task scheduling. We describe the design ratio-nale and architecture of DECOR and present some preliminary ex-amples applying our approach to common network management tasks