Organizations: University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR · University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark · Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
TopoEdge is a topology-grounded, edge-deployable framework for end-to-end software-defined networking (SDN) configuration generation and repair, motivated by the brittleness of configuration artefacts under topology variation and by strict operational constraints on latency, privacy, and on-site execution. TopoEdge represents each target topology as a router-level graph and embeds it using a contrastively trained graph neural network (GNN), enabling nearest-neighbour retrieval of a verified reference configuration paired with an executable Python driver (a Topotest/pytest test script that orchestrates the emulated network and checks protocol assertions). The target topology, retrieved reference topology, and reference driver are assembled into a topology-grounded retrieval-augmented generation context (TopoRAG), which grounds a distributed, execution-centric generate--verify--repair loop coordinated by a central controller and realised by three role-specialised agents: (i) a Planning agent that produces a topology-consistent configuration plan and a per-device skeleton; (ii) a Generation agent that materialises executable configuration artefacts, including device configurations and the driver; and (iii) a Verification agent that runs the FRRouting Topotest/pytest harness, compresses failures into a compact trace, and emits localised patch directives for iterative repair.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: TopoEdge: a topology JSON is encoded and embedded for nearest-neighbour retrieval of a verified reference, forming TopoRAG that grounds a distributed AI agent planning–generation–verify loop for iterative configuration generation and repair.
Fig. 2: Example prompts for Planning, Generation, and Verify agents.
Fig. 3: Cumulative pass rate versus iteration.
Fig. 4: Iteration-at-pass frequency among successful cases.
Method
P@1
P@5
P@10
P@20
Med
Avg
TopoEdge
0.130
0.460
0.725
0.890
5
7.835
No-TopoRAG
0.060
0.230
0.345
0.550
9
13.275
Central-LLM
0.140
0.510
0.755
0.930
4
7.035
TABLE I: Success and iteration statistics on 200 held-out cases. Med is the median iterations to pass among successful cases. Avg is the average iterations per case, including capped failures.
Method
Time (s)
Tokens
Verify runs
Cap fails
TopoEdge
220
4,000
7.8
22
No-TopoRAG
360
6,900
13.3
90
Central-LLM
75
4,400
7.0
14
TABLE II: Efficiency metrics. Verify runs align with loop iterations. Cap fails are cases that do not pass within 20 iterations.
Variant
P@20
Avg iters
Tokens
Invalid rate
Full TopoEdge
0.890
7.835
4,000
0.045
Without adaptive budgets
0.875
8.150
4,700
0.048
Without constrained decoding
0.840
9.400
4,600
0.090
Without both
0.800
10.200
5,400
0.140
TABLE III: Ablation of system controllers. Invalid rate counts iterations that produce non-executable artefacts or schema-violating parameters.
Enterprise security topology design requires translating business intent, regulatory requirements, and risk assumptions into zones, boundary devices, inter-zone paths, and access-control policies. Existing NetOps automation tools mainly operate after this design is fixed, providing limited support for generating structured security topologies from underspecified natural-language requirements. We present TopoIntent, a system that compiles security intent into executable, compliance-checked network topologies. It uses a schema contract to constrain generation, retrieves reference architectures from a curated template library via dense-vector search, and applies staged fusion for intent-template alignment and security completion. The generated topology is checked against CIS Controls v8.1.2 safeguards visible at the topology layer, while unresolved cases are marked for manual review. Structural gaps are repaired through additive schema-preserving edits. The final topology is exported to Mininet scripts with kernel-level iptables ACLs, enabling executable reachability and allow/deny tests. Because no public benchmark exists for this requirement-to-topology task, we construct an evaluation set from reference security architecture diagrams. The retrieval set contains 22 templates and 44 synthetic intents across five scenarios, while the held-out set contains 7 templates and 14 intents from finance and government scenarios excluded from retrieval. On the held-out set, additive repair improves topology-visible CIS satisfaction from 0.78 to 1.00 in fewer than 1.5 rounds on average, and one feedback round raises the post-ACL policy pass rate from 0.78 to 0.88.
Xiaokang Qu, Jianliang Ma, Zao Fan +3
School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Topsec Technologies Group Inc., Beijing, China
Designing deployable and resilient network topologies from natural language requirements remains a challenging problem in network automation. This work investigates the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate structurally valid and constraint-compliant network topologies through a constraint-driven pipeline combining hierarchical modeling and systematic validation. The framework is evaluated via a multimodel comparison of proprietary and open-weight LLMs across four realistic network scenarios released as a public dataset. We assess structural correctness using node and edge F1-scores against reference topologies, and evaluate resilience through server and content connectivity metrics. In addition, we analyze common failure modes, including interface mismatches and directional inconsistencies in generated topologies. Overall, this work provides a systematic benchmark for understanding how LLMs handle structural and resilience constraints in topology synthesis, and supports informed model selection for AI-driven network design.
Misconfigurations in computer networks remain a major source of critical Internet outages. Research is turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the complex, error-prone task of network configuration. However, even state-of-the-art models fail to resolve misconfigurations in large-scale, complex scenarios and often introduce new errors. In this work, we benchmark open- and closed-source LLMs augmented with formal network verification and context retrieval tools. We demonstrate that agentic architectures outperform base LLMs in repair efficacy (by 12% on average) and safety (by 17% on average), enabled by the ability to dynamically manage context and iteratively validate configuration repairs.
Rufat Asadli, Benjamin Hoffman, Ioannis Protogeros +1
Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich.