Towards consistent software defined networking with logic programming

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows the construction of virtual networks on top of a datacenter network infrastructure. However, the flexibility also increases the chance of inconsistencies in the network configurations caused by component failures, software bugs, or human errors. The inconsistencies may result in service outage or security policy violation. We propose a model-based verification system to check the consistency of a virtual network. The system models the requirements as logic constraints and extracts the configuration states of a virtual network. The configuration states are checked against the logic constraints by using a SMT solver[1]. The prototype system successfully detects various inconsistencies injected to the testbed and incurs reasonable amount of overheads.