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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 17, 2015
Accession Number
AD1000402

Entities

People

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

Organizations

  • Cornell University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Automata
  • Bandwidth
  • Climate Change
  • Computer Access Control
  • Computer Programming
  • Consistency
  • Data Centers
  • Guarantees
  • Hard Copy
  • Language
  • Message Processing
  • Notation
  • Routing Protocols
  • Software Defined Networks
  • Specifications
  • Topology

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.