Weighted NetKAT: A Programming Language For Quantitative Network Verification

TL;DR

Weighted NetKAT is a new domain-specific language for modeling and verifying quantitative network properties using semirings, with automatic decision procedures demonstrated on a real network case study.

Contribution

It introduces weighted NetKAT with a novel automata model, enabling automatic reasoning about quantitative safety and reachability in networks.

Findings

Automated decision procedures for quantitative safety and reachability.

A denotational and operational semantics for weighted NetKAT.

Case study demonstrating applicability on Internet2's Abilene network.

Abstract

We introduce weighted NetKAT, a domain-specific language for modeling and verifying quantitative network properties. The language is parametric on a semiring, enabling the treatment of a wide range of quantities in a uniform way. We provide a denotational semantics and an equivalent operational semantics, the latter based on a novel model of weighted NetKAT automata (WNKA) capturing the stateful behavior of our language. With WNKA, we obtain a class of generic decision procedures for reasoning about quantitative safety and reachability in a fully automatic way, even in the presence of possibly unbounded iteration. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in a case study using Internet2's Abilene network as the underlying topology.