Automated synthesis of reactive controllers for software-defined networks

With the tremendous growth of the Internet and the emerging software-defined networks, there is an increasing need for rigorous and scalable network management methods and tool support. This paper proposes a synthesis approach for managing software-defined networks. We formulate the construction of network control logic as a reactive synthesis problem which is solvable with existing synthesis tools. The key idea is to synthesize a strategy that manages control logic in response to network changes while satisfying some network-wide specification. Finally, we investigate network abstractions for scalability. For large networks, instead of synthesizing control logic directly, we use its abstraction—a smaller network that simulates its behavior—for synthesis, and then implement the synthesized control on the original network while preserving the correctness. By using the so-called simulation relations, we also prove the soundness of this abstraction-based synthesis approach.