A knowledge plane for the internet

By David D. Clark, Craig Partridge, J. Christopher Ramming, John Wroclawski. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2003

718 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a new objective for network research: to build a fundamentally different sort of network that can assemble itself given high level instructions, reassemble itself as requirements change, automatically discover when something goes wrong, and automatically fix a detected problem or explain why it cannot do so.We further argue that to achieve this goal, it is not sufficient to improve incrementally on the techniques and algorithms we know today. Instead, we propose a new construct, the Knowledge Plane, a pervasive system within the network that builds and maintains high-level models of what the network is supposed to do, in order to provide services and advice to other elements of the network. The knowledge plane is novel in its reliance on the tools of AI and cognitive systems. We argue that cognitive techniques, rather than traditional algorithmic approaches, are best suited to meeting the uncertainties and complexity of our objective.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fedc039ef7aa60d9c3ac0d0a076ac34f73f12a0

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In Artificial Intelligence

Citations in the corpus

A survey of autonomic communications (2006, background): “Clark’s influential vision of a knowledge plane [Clark et al. 2003] provides architectural support for integrating low-level (transport and network) knowledge with higher-level applications”
Knowledge-Defined Networking (2016, background): “In this paper, we advocate that the centralized control offered by SDN, combined with a rich centralized view of the network provided by network analytics, enable the deployment of the KP concept proposed in [1].”
A clean slate 4D approach to network control and management (2005, background): “Many different paradigms for this area have been explored, including Signaling System 7 and the Intelligent Network, active networks, and policybased networking, and there is increasing attention in the Internet research community [29].”
Distributed SDN Control: Survey, Taxonomy, and Challenges (2018, background): “Clark’s theory [91] about the network being manageable by an additional high-level entity known as the Knowledge Plane.”
A Survey of Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Software Defined Networking (SDN): Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “A few years ago, a Knowledge Plane (KP) approach [1] has been proposed to bring automation, recommendation and intelligence to the Internet, by applying Machine Learning (ML) and cognitive techniques.”
iPlane: an information plane for distributed services (2006, background): “We note that allof these argumentshave been recognized before [48, 8, 53, 23], however a convincing validation has remained starkly absent.”
6G and Beyond: The Future of Wireless Communications Systems (2020, background): “In fact, Clark et al. introduced the concept of the Knowledge Plane [93] back in 2003, describing it as a pervasive ML-based system within the network that is geared towards providing services and advice to other elements of the network.”
Cognitive networks: adaptation and learning to achieve end-to-end performance objectives (2006, background): “Perhaps the first mention of a cognitive network-like concept was in the article by Clark et al. on the network knowledge plane, which they define as a “pervasive system within the network that builds and maintains high level models of what the network is supposed to do” [ 5 ].”
Machine Learning for Networking: Workflow, Advances and Opportunities (2017, methodology): “In order to enable the network to perform diagnostics and make decisions by itself with the help of machine learning or cognitive algorithms, a different network architecture, the Knowledge Plane [12], was presented that can achieve automatic information cognition, which has inspired the following e”
Correlating Instrumentation Data to System States: A Building Block for Automated Diagnosis and Control (2004, background): “TANs comprise a subclass of Bayesian networks, recently of interest to the systems community as potential elements of an Internet “Knowledge Plane” [10].”
Knowledge Networks (2005, background): “Before cont i nu i ng, we emphas i se that our approach here i s clearly d i st i ngu i shed from the ‘knowledge plane’ approach [Cla03], and thus i ntroduces d i fferent research i ssues .”