RapidLearn: A General Purpose Toolkit for Autonomic Networking

Abstract: Software Defined Networking has unfolded a new area of opportunity in distributed networking and intelligent networks. There has been a great interest in performing machine learning in distributed setting, exploiting the abstraction of SDN which makes it easier to write complex ML queries on standard control plane. However, most of the research has been made towards specialized problems (security, performance improvement, middlebox management etc) and not towards a generic framework. Also, existing tools and software require specialized knowledge of the algorithm/network to operate or monitor these systems. We built a generic toolkit which abstracts out the underlying structure, algorithms and other intricacies and gives an intuitive way for a common user to create and deploy distributed machine learning network applications. Decisions are made at local level by the switches and communicated to other switches to improve upon these decisions. Finally, a global decision is taken by controller based on another algorithm (in our case voting). We demonstrate efficacy of the framework through a simple DDoS detection algorithm.