10,635 research outputs found
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
Empirical Bounds on Linear Regions of Deep Rectifier Networks
We can compare the expressiveness of neural networks that use rectified
linear units (ReLUs) by the number of linear regions, which reflect the number
of pieces of the piecewise linear functions modeled by such networks. However,
enumerating these regions is prohibitive and the known analytical bounds are
identical for networks with same dimensions. In this work, we approximate the
number of linear regions through empirical bounds based on features of the
trained network and probabilistic inference. Our first contribution is a method
to sample the activation patterns defined by ReLUs using universal hash
functions. This method is based on a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP)
formulation of the network and an algorithm for probabilistic lower bounds of
MILP solution sets that we call MIPBound, which is considerably faster than
exact counting and reaches values in similar orders of magnitude. Our second
contribution is a tighter activation-based bound for the maximum number of
linear regions, which is particularly stronger in networks with narrow layers.
Combined, these bounds yield a fast proxy for the number of linear regions of a
deep neural network.Comment: AAAI 202
Control Plane Compression
We develop an algorithm capable of compressing large networks into a smaller
ones with similar control plane behavior: For every stable routing solution in
the large, original network, there exists a corresponding solution in the
compressed network, and vice versa. Our compression algorithm preserves a wide
variety of network properties including reachability, loop freedom, and path
length. Consequently, operators may speed up network analysis, based on
simulation, emulation, or verification, by analyzing only the compressed
network. Our approach is based on a new theory of control plane equivalence. We
implement these ideas in a tool called Bonsai and apply it to real and
synthetic networks. Bonsai can shrink real networks by over a factor of 5 and
speed up analysis by several orders of magnitude.Comment: Extended version of the paper appearing in ACM SIGCOMM 201
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