Formal Verification of Interoperability Between Future Network Architectures Using Alloy

Abstract

The Internet is composed of many interconnected, interoperating networks. With the recent advances in Future Internet design, multiple new network architectures, especially Information-Centric Networks (ICN) have emerged. Given the ubiquity of networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP), it is likely that we will have a number of different interconnecting network domains with different architectures, including ICNs. Their interoperability is important, but at the same time difficult to prove. A formal tool can be helpful for such analysis. ICNs have a number of unique characteristics, warranting formal analysis, establishing properties that go beyond, and are different from, what have been used in the state-of-the-art because ICN operates at the level of content names rather than node addresses. We need to focus on node-to-content reachability, rather than node-to-node reachability. In this paper, we present a formal approach to model and analyze information-centric interoperability (ICI). We use Alloy Analyzer’s model finding approach to verify properties expressed as invariants for information-centric services (both pull and push-based models) including content reachability and returnability. We extend our use of Alloy to model counting, to quantitatively analyze failure and mobility properties. We present a formally-verified ICI framework that allows for seamless interoperation among a multitude of network architectures. We also report on the impact of domain types, routing policies, and binding techniques on the probability of content reachability and returnability, under failures and mobility.