If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, you’ve probably uttered a variation of this: “What’s going on with my Internet!?” Whether you’re technically savvy or not, your first step toward fixing your network problem is always the same: vent your frustration into the void.
If you’re a networking professional, you can then open Wireshark and manually search for the cause – and perhaps find a solution. However, if you don’t have a networking background, you’ll likely have to contact customer support and schedule a technician to come to you and solve the problem. But this route can be expensive and time-consuming. Is there a reliable way to fix network issues that arise while avoiding the cost of customer support, all while providing a great user experience?
Reply out of the blue
The solution to this problem is a CableLabs prototype called NetLLM – Your Home Networking Assistant. Powered by a large language model (LLM) located on your home router, NetLLM examines network activity and any other relevant information (for example, configuration files, logs of past events, and network metrics such as signal strength and channel noise). He then explains the problem in more detail and tries to fix it.
Your entire interaction with this automated network assistant can be a one-time response, or it can develop into a conversation in which you and NetLLM discuss the issue and try to address it – all in plain English.
If the issue is not resolved, NetLLM will at least add some transparency to the errors and make them less ambiguous by explaining them in less technical terms (“Oh, that’s a DNS error”). You can also choose to record the interaction so that you can send that information to customer support when you call, thus providing important context about the network conditions that caused the issue and what steps were actually taken.
Networks as a language
The key to NetLLM is that it treats network communications as its own language.
Like any other language, each network protocol has its own syntax and semantics system. However, unlike the syntax of human languages, the syntax of networks is more structured; The packages themselves and the sequences of packages are organized in a very specific way that provides semantic meaning. Thinking of computer communications as a language is the key to using LLM to decode problems in a network – just as LLM can be used to explain and interpret a conversation between humans.
It is important to note that the real power of NetLLM is not the chat interface it uses to talk to users but rather the NetLLM it uses to diagnose the problem itself. Training will be conducted using a curated dataset of question-answer pairs on network traffic from a wide range of sources, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, various network attacks and regular traffic.
Network configuration and management
In addition to being trained to recognize and understand network traffic, NetLLM is also trained in network administration and configuration. For a home user, network management requires updating network settings to fix user issues (for example, addressing firewalls, resetting DNS, and handling jittered video calls). Therefore, if any of the issues in the diagnostic step are due to configuration issues, NetLLM will attempt to fix them.
The user can also request a network configuration change such as changing a password or creating a guest network in plain English without having to pull up the router configuration user interface (UI).
Future development
Where do we go from here? In addition to being an interactive tool that the user can use manually to request network assistance, NetLLM is intended to be a proactive feature and act as a daemon in the background, monitoring your network for security improvements and threats.
This is the ultimate in customer service: solving problems before the customer even realizes them!
Your IT friend
This automated network assistant has the power to be a one-stop-shop for everything going on in your home network and the broader Internet, all while protecting you from potential problems. With diagnostics, configuration, and management capabilities, NetLLM gives you complete visibility into your network and allows for easy configuration – all in understandable English.
Even if you are a networking professional and have the skills to fix problems yourself, NetLLM can save your time. From advanced features like setting up firewalls and fixing problematic video calls, to more everyday functions like managing passwords and monitoring your network, CableLabs makes troubleshooting and managing your network as easy as asking a very talented IT friend for help.
