Csep-561-Reading-5D

Condor: Better Topologies Through Declarative Design

Main contributions:

• Topology Description Language (TDL) for expressing network topology requirements and goals
• Constraint-based synthesizer to generate candidate topologies
• Support for network expansion in the form of metrics evaluating expandability and planning expansion phases on live networks.
  The Condor framework is intended to be iterative:

1. Architect adds constraints
2. Evaluates the synthesized topologies
3. Repeat until satisfied.
   Interestingly (and mildly disappointingly) this declarative language is meant to be an embedded DSL within an object-oriented language. Going by the example in Figure 2, It is largely declarative, but given the problem domain description I was expecting something like Datalog.
   It appears that a still unsolved problem is quanitfying a topology's bandwidth for a given traffic matrix; the paper proposes some limited metrics but acknowledge that this problem is not fully solved, and thus their framework is hampered in that it cannot yet provide good metrics for a candidate topology's reliability or expandability.