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Wenlong Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Wenlong Ding.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

RoutingBench: Can Agentic Routing Analysis Scale to Production Datacenter Networks?

Recent advances in AI models and agentic technologies make AI for network operations (NetOps) within reach. However, scalability remains a key bottleneck of agentic NetOps when analyzing hyperscale networks, which comprise hundreds of datacenters, each housing thousands of network devices. The scalability challenge is rooted in the requirement of many NetOps tasks that must conduct global reasoning on how a local change of device behavior affects all relevant routing paths, known as routing-path analysis. This paper studies this scalability problem and evaluates how different agentic approaches, namely in-context learning, iterative reasoning, and agent skills, can scale routing-path analysis to large, complex networks. We present RoutingBench for evaluating agentic routing-path analysis, with varying network size and complexity, for various types of device changes. Our results show that agentic analysis is promising: agent skills curated with a principle termed "explore more; digest less" enables routing-path analysis on hyperscale networks of 50K routers with an accuracy of 99.5%, significantly outreaching the scalability of traditional symbolic analysis. Meanwhile, RoutingBench also reveals the boundary of AI agent capability on complex inter-datacenter networks and compound changes, posing open challenges for AI and agentic research.

cs.NI

Automating Conflict-Aware ACL Configurations with Natural Language Intents

ACL configuration is essential for managing network flow reachability, yet its complexity grows significantly with topologies and pre-existing rules. To carry out ACL configuration, the operator needs to (1) understand the new configuration policies or intents and translate them into concrete ACL rules, (2) check and resolve any conflicts between the new and existing rules, and (3) deploy them across the network. Existing systems rely heavily on manual efforts for these tasks, especially for the first two, which are tedious, error-prone, and impractical to scale. We propose Xumi to tackle this problem. Leveraging LLMs with domain knowledge of the target network, Xumi automatically and accurately translates the natural language intents into complete ACL rules to reduce operators' manual efforts. Xumi then detects all potential conflicts between new and existing rules and generates resolved intents for deployment with operators' guidance, and finally identifies the best deployment plan that minimizes the rule additions while satisfying all intents. Evaluation shows that Xumi accelerates the entire configuration pipeline by over 10x compared to current practices, addresses O(100) conflicting ACLs and reduces rule additions by ~40% in modern cloud network.

cs.NI