8/7/2019 Paper14_Review

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Paper Review

Yu-Wei Eric Sung, Sanjay Rao, Geoffrey Xie, and David Maltz. "Towards Systematic Design of Enterprise Networks", in Proc. ACM CoNEXT, 2008

You have ignored its size, You have underestimated its complexity, You have misunderstood its

unique challenges, The monster , its size, its complexity and challenges surpassed beyond youranticipation.....Now Face It.

The motivation of this paper is to provide a systematic formulation of this critical but poorlyunderstood monster , 'The Enterprise network'. The eye opening argument provided by author, thatdespite of its size , its complexity, prevalence and diversity enterprise networks have received littleattention from research community.

The authors insisted on the fact, that the managers of enterprise networks face unique designchallenges. They need to meet a wider range of security and performance requirements than theircounterparts carrier networks. For example the configuration of VLANs to ease the management ofdifferent user groups ,integration of multiple routing domains to support company mergers.

Since the challenges of enterprise networks are unique and much more complex thus cannot beaddressed by existing ad-hoc approach.

The paper prepared the ground towards 'Systematic Approach' by highlighting an irony, that On onehand, a manager of enterprise network faces high level constraints such as performance , ease ofmanageability , security and resilience to failures. On the other hand, to realize a network design, themanger must manually choose from a slew of protocols , low-level mechanism, following 'protocol byprotocol' method. Thus there is a need for formulating a systematic approach for control andconfiguration of Enterprise networks. Firstly, paper model operational goals with network wide abstractions; e.g., the traffic matrix for thetask of VLAN design and the reachability matrix for the task of reachability control. Secondly theyformulated each task as a set of optimization problems , each modeling a different strategy and allsubject to correctness and feasibility criteria associated with the task. Finally author developedheuristics through 'NP completeness' and 'Min Cut' to solve each of the optimization problem.

I am stunned to see the excellent validation and evaluation effort presented in the paper. Its a lesson forpeople like me, who have never imagined that such a huge experiment and data collection on a liveuniversity network can be done as a proof of concept. It is really a commendable effort by authors andsupport by people from PURDUE ITAP lab.

Research is in action for betterment of system is highlighted by the instance where authors, whileexperimenting, found the potential bug in the ACL placement of university live network.

There are few limitations to the work presented in the paper, like the two task addressed in this paper,formulated sequentially, what if optimizing one effects the cost of other. In other words design space ofdifferent task may overlap.

An excellent motive, presented beautifully, great algorithmic formulation, commendable experimentalvalidation'One of the classic paper for Enterprise Networks'....