SDN-Actors: Modeling and verification of SDN programs

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a recent networking paradigm that has become increasingly popular in the last decade. It gives unprecedented control over the global behavior of the network and provides a new opportunity for formal methods. Much work has appeared in the last few years on providing bridges between SDN and verification. This paper advances this research line and provides a link between SDN and traditional work on formal methods for verification of distributed software—actor-based modelling. We show how SDN programs can be seamlessly modelled using actors, and thus existing advanced model checking techniques developed for actors can be directly applied to verify a range of properties of SDN networks, including consistency of flow tables, violation of safety policies, and forwarding loops.