Efficient synthesis of network updates

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is revolutionizing the networking industry, but current SDN programming platforms do not provide automated mechanisms for updating global configurations on the fly. Implementing updates by hand is challenging for SDN programmers because networks are distributed systems with hundreds or thousands of interacting nodes. Even if initial and final configurations are correct, naively updating individual nodes can lead to incorrect transient behaviors, including loops, black holes, and access control violations. This paper presents an approach for automatically synthesizing updates that are guaranteed to preserve specified properties. We formalize network updates as a distributed programming problem and develop a synthesis algorithm based on counterexample-guided search and incremental model checking. We describe a prototype implementation, and present results from experiments on real-world topologies and properties demonstrating that our tool scales to updates involving over one-thousand nodes.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jun 03, 2015
Source ID
10.1145/2813885.2737980

Entities

People

  • Hossein Hojjat
  • Jedidiah Mcclurg
  • Nate Foster
  • Pavol Černý

Organizations

  • Cornell University
  • National Science Foundation
  • Office of Naval Research
  • University of Colorado Boulder

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.