Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Comparing Beliefs, Surveys and Random Walks

Survey propagation is a powerful technique from statistical physics that has been applied to solve the 3-SAT problem both in principle and in practice. We give, using only probability arguments, a common derivation of survey propagation, belief propagation and several interesting hybrid methods. We then present numerical experiments which use WSAT (a widely used random-walk based SAT solver) to quantify the complexity of the 3-SAT formulae as a function of their parameters, both as randomly generated and after simplification, guided by survey propagation. Some properties of WSAT which have not previously been reported make it an ideal tool for this purpose -- its mean cost is proportional to the number of variables in the formula (at a fixed ratio of clauses to variables) in the easy-SAT regime and slightly beyond, and its behavior in the hard-SAT regime appears to reflect the underlying structure of the solution space that has been predicted by replica symmetry-breaking arguments. An analysis of the tradeoffs between the various methods of search for satisfying assignments shows WSAT to be far more powerful that has been appreciated, and suggests some interesting new directions for practical algorithm development.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure