Using Alloy to Formally Model and Reason About an OpenFlow Network Switch

Published:

Recommended citation: Saber Mirzaei, Sanaz Bahargam, Richard Skowyra, Assaf Kfoury, Azer Bestavros TP2013.

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Abstract

Openflow provides a standard interface for separating a network into a data plane and a programmatic control plane. This enables easy network reconfiguration, but introduces the potential for programming bugs to cause network effects. To study OpenFlow switch behavior, we used Alloy to create a software abstraction describing the internal state of a network and its OpenFlow switches. This work is an attempt to model the static and dynamic behaviour a network built using OpenFlow switches.