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.

References in corpus (2)

• Random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions and their applications
• Toward Synthesis of Network Updates

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Survey of Consistent Software-Defined Network Updates
• Event-Driven Network Programming
• Report on the NSF Workshop on Formal Methods for Security
• Decentralized Consistent Network Updates in SDN with ez-Segway
• D2R: Dataplane-Only Policy-Compliant Routing Under Failures
• The Augmentation-Speed Tradeoff for Consistent Network Updates
• Towards Model Checking Real-World Software-Defined Networks (version with appendix)
• NetRep: Automatic Repair for Network Programs