arXiv:2607.26352cs.NIcs.AI2026-07

构建可组合的网络实验后台,让研究者快速验证想法。

Pramana: A Composable, Domain-Specific Backend for Empirical Networking Research

论文配图:Pramana: A Composable, Domain-Specific Backend for Empirical Networking Research
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用统一规范拆分实验为意图、底座、机制三部分,实现跨平台复用。
  • 覆盖255个真实研究意图,现有工具最多满足13%,本方案达34%。
  • 适合想加速网络实验验证的研究者,尤其在智能辅助时代意义重大。

网络研究的进步依赖于将假设转化为实证证据,加速这一过程的关键在于缩短从构思到生成数据的时间差距。例如,要验证大流量BBR下载是否能公平共享与实时谷歌会议流量共用的瓶颈链路,需配置真实瓶颈链路,同时生成BBR的批量传输和会议的实时流量,并收集服务质量指标。当前这一过程开销大,常迫使研究者从零开始。随着智能代理时代的到来,人工智能辅助构想速度指数级提升,但其输出仍需依赖高效的数据生成后端进行验证。本文提出一种名为Pramana的可组合、领域专用后端,通过单一契约——意图规范,将实验分解为三个独立维度:意图(生成什么数据)、底座(在何处生成)、机制(如何生成),从而实现一份规范在任意底座上运行。我们基于66篇已发表论文挖掘出首个涵盖255个数据生成意图的语料库,验证该规范可覆盖全部意图,而现有工具最多满足13%。当前原型已满足34%的意图,超过最佳现有工具两倍以上,并规划了通过社区协作填补抽象与实现之间差距的路线图,以推动实证网络研究的加速。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Networking research advances by turning hypotheses into empirical evidence, so accelerating it means reducing the lag between ideation (synthesizing a hypothesis) and generating the data that tests it. Consider a concrete case: does a bulk BBR download fairly share its bottleneck with competing real-time Google Meet traffic? Validating this requires configuring a realistic bottleneck link, concurrently generating BBR's bulk transfer and Meet's real-time traffic, and collecting relevant service-quality metrics. Today this overhead is high, often forcing researchers to start from scratch for every new idea. This ideation-to-data-generation gap will only worsen in the agentic AI era, where AI-assisted ideation accelerates exponentially, yet its outputs cannot be validated without a data-generation backend. This paper explores how to bridge this gap. We envision a composable, domain-specific backend, Pramana, shaped as a thin waist, with diverse research intents at the top and disparate execution substrates at the bottom. Pramana realizes this waist through a single contract, the intent specification, which disaggregates an experiment into three independent axes: the intent (what data to generate), the substrate (where to generate it), and the mechanism (how to produce it), so one specification runs on any substrate. We demonstrate Pramana's utility by building a first-of-its-kind corpus of 255 data-generation intents mined from 66 published papers, and show the intent specification satisfies all of them, where no existing tool satisfies more than 13%. Our current proof-of-concept implementation already satisfies 34% of these intents, more than twice the best existing tool, and we lay out a roadmap for closing this abstraction-implementation gap through a broader community effort to build the envisioned data-generation backend and accelerate empirical networking research.

网络研究实验自动化可组合系统

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