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 your
anticipation.....Now Face It.”

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

The authors insisted on the fact, that the managers of enterprise networks face unique design
challenges. They need to meet a wider range of security and performance requirements than their
counterparts carrier networks. For example the configuration of VLANs to ease the management of
different 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 be
addressed by existing ad-hoc approach.

The paper prepared the ground towards 'Systematic Approach' by highlighting an irony, that On one
hand, a manager of enterprise network faces high level constraints such as performance , ease of
manageability , security and resilience to failures. On the other hand, to realize a network design, the
manger must manually choose from a slew of protocols , low-level mechanism, following 'protocol by
protocol' method. Thus there is a need for formulating a systematic approach for control and
configuration of Enterprise networks.

Firstly, paper model operational goals with network wide abstractions; e.g., the traffic matrix for the
task of VLAN design and the reachability matrix for the task of reachability control. Secondly they
formulated each task as a set of optimization problems , each modeling a different strategy and all
subject to correctness and feasibility criteria associated with the task. Finally author developed
heuristics 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 for
people like me, who have never imagined that such a huge experiment and data collection on a live
university network can be done as a proof of concept. It is really a commendable effort by authors and
support by people from PURDUE ITAP lab.

Research is in action for betterment of system is highlighted by the instance where authors, while
experimenting, 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 of
different task may overlap.

An excellent motive, presented beautifully, great algorithmic formulation, commendable experimental

validation…'One of the classic paper for Enterprise Networks'....