An LLM-based Agentic Framework for Accessible Network Control

Traditional approaches to network management have been accessible only to a handful of highly-trained network operators with significant expert knowledge. This creates barriers for lay users to easily manage their networks without resorting to experts. With recent development of powerful large language models (LLMs) for language comprehension, we design a system to make network management accessible to a broader audience of non-experts by allowing users to converse with networks in natural language. To effectively leverage advancements in LLMs, we propose an agentic framework that uses an intermediate representation to streamline configuration across diverse vendor equipment, retrieves the network state from memory in real-time, and provides an interface for external feedback. We also conduct pilot studies to collect real user data of natural language utterances for network control, and present a visualization interface to facilitate dialogue-driven user interaction and enable large-scale data collection for future development. Preliminary experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed system components with LLM integration on both synthetic and real user utterances. Through our data collection and visualization efforts, we pave the way for more effective use of LLMs and democratize network control for everyday users.