Configtrans: Network Configuration Translation Based on Large Language Models and Constraint Solving

Damage or relocation of network devices necessitates the replacement of devices. Additionally, manufacturers of devices may also change due to factors such as price, policies, and functional limitations. This brings great needs of converting existing configurations to fix new devices and ensuring consistent network policy behaviors, which is configuration translation. Manually translating requires network administrators to possess significant configuration expertise and to spend extreme time translating thousands of commands for a core device. Therefore, we propose ConfigTrans, a novel configuration translation method for commands with and without parameters based on constraint solving and large language models (LLMs), respectively. For commands with parameters, we explore constraints about parameters, commands, and format limitations, and design a heuristic algorithm to solve them. For commands without parameters, we utilize an LLM to find the translation. The most likely several commands are selected based on semantic similarity, and the final result and keywords in it are chosen by the LLM. To meet the requirements of the view, the result commands are arranged while supplementing missing higherview commands. Experimental results show that our method achieves an accuracy rate of 82.47 % for translating commands with parameters and 75.5 % for commands without parameters.