High-level modeling and application validation for SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables applications running on its control plane. The Northbound API allows programmers to develop SDN applications for a number of policy-based network management tasks. However, there is still a clear need for supporting the development of controller-agnostic modeled applications. In this paper, we show how the Model-Driven Networking (MDN), a framework composed of CASE tool and Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML), can be a feasible solution to create applications independent from controllers and to enable proper verification of SDN applications. Our evaluation demonstrates that MDN framework is viable for using in real scenarios and independent from SDN controllers. Moreover, our performance tests show that: (i) MDN's code generation is two times faster than other approaches; and (ii) it can validate several constraints and complex topologies at millisecond-timescale.