Model Checking of Software-Defined Networking for Multiple Applications

With the development of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), more and more SDN applications are deployed in the networks. However, different developers will develop applications according to their own wishes, which may cause interference when these applications work together. In many SDN applications studies, although single application passes the verification, it is hard to avoid the interference between different applications. For the research of multi-application interference, the correctness of single application is often not considered. As a consequence, this paper proposes a new model checking method for multiple SDN applications. Not only does it consider the correctness of single application, but also the detection of multi-application interference. Firstly, we propose a new model, Multi-Applications Extended Finite State Machine (MA-EFSM), that can describe the coexistence situation of multiple applications. Then we define the correctness properties for single application and the interference properties for multi-application used in model checking respectively. This method can not only detect the design defects of single application, but also detect the interference between multiple applications. Finally, we propose a test framework based on verification further. It can test multiple SDN applications in a real network environment.