Using an Autonomic Control Plane for Stable Connectivity of Network Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM)

Abstract

Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM), as per BCP 161, for data networks is often subject to the problem of circular dependencies when relying on connectivity provided by the network to be managed for the OAM purposes.Provisioning while bringing up devices and networks tends to be more difficult to automate than service provisioning later on. Changes in core network functions impacting reachability cannot be automated because of ongoing connectivity requirements for the OAM equipment itself, and widely used OAM protocols are not secure enough to be carried across the network without security concerns.This document describes how to integrate OAM processes with an autonomic control plane in order to provide stable and secure connectivity for those OAM processes. This connectivity is not subject to the aforementioned circular dependencies.

KIRA: Distributed Scalable ID-based Routing with Fast Forwarding

“…This requires the ability to interconnect and reach all these resources in order to exert the necessary resource control, e.g., as part of Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) tasks. In this context, IETF's ANIMA working group envisions a unified and autonomous controllability of the resource pool [2]- [4]. However, a separate infrastructure for out-of-band OAM (requiring its own setup, configuration, and also its own OAM) has prohibitive costs and scaling limitations for such dynamic resource pools.…”

“…However, a separate infrastructure for out-of-band OAM (requiring its own setup, configuration, and also its own OAM) has prohibitive costs and scaling limitations for such dynamic resource pools. Thus, a pervasive, highly reliable and resilient in-band control plane (CP) connectivity between the networked resources is required to control an elastic ondemand infrastructure [2]. Any CP message exchange (e.g., OAM, SDN/NFV/Cluster control) will run on top of this base CP connectivity.…”