Automatically Mining the Causality Between Network Configurations and Routing Behaviors

The encapsulated route images provided by vendors hide detailed implementation codes of routing protocol, making it challenging to implement the same routing protocol on heterogeneous devices, as well as to locate and repair the configuration errors. While some works attempt to address the above issues, they fail in large-scale deployment, manifested in insufficiency in complex routing behaviors, lack of clear mapping between routing behavior and protocol standards, and difficulty in obtaining an open-source license. To solve all the problems, we propose RTB, a novel tool to mine the causality between network configurations and routing behaviors, in order to assist operations personnel in better pinpointing configuration errors. First, RTB generates test cases based on configuration features using a coverage-guided combinatorial testing algorithm. Then, RTB employs a differential network model to obtain differential datasets storing the correspondence between configurations and routing behaviors. Finally, RTB utilizes the differential datasets to create multilayer causal graphs, so as to reason about the implementation details and differences in routing protocols, which assists network operation and maintenance personnel in locating configuration errors. Experimental results show that RTB only needs 35.3 % test cases, and improves code coverage by 10 % over Metha. Moreover, RTB can mine the causality with 98 % accuracy, which is 5 % more efficient than existing tools.