Anemone: Edge-based network management

This proposal describes the Anemone project and a demonstration of the work so far. The project is developing an edge-based IP network management platform which utilises only information collected at the edges of the network, eschewing the need to collect data in the network core. Devoting a small fraction of hosts’ idle cycles, disk space, and network bandwidth to network management allows inference of network-wide traffic patterns by synthesising end-system flow statistics with dynamic topology information obtained through passive snooping of IP routeing protocols. We claim that this approach will provide a more complete view of the network that supports sophisticated traffic engineering queries to supply the global statistics necessary to automate network control, and is future-proofed against increasing deployment of encrypting and tunnelling protocols.