A systematic literature review on formal verification of software‐defined networks

Abstract

By raising evolutionary network connections, a software‐defined network (SDN) offers a well‐managed and flexible novel network topology. The SDN efforts are provided to abstract the original network configuration for business applications and web services. Additionally, the SDN modifies the network management policies such as topology policies, deployment policies, the applicability, and infrastructure maintenance. One of the important features of the SDN is standardizing the network interfaces with the precise functional semantics in application and control flow layers. In another hand, specification and evaluation of the existing network interfaces is a main and significant challenge to prove the correctness of the configurable scenarios in the SDN approach. Recently, formal verification presents a high potential platform to evaluate the main‐layer scenarios of the SDN as the novel perspective in this area. Up to now, there is no survey and state‐of‐the‐art review on the formal verification methods in the SDN. This paper provides a systematic literature review (SLR) for the formal verification methods in the SDN in form of the SDN plans to recognize the state of the art of the open challenges. The presented SLR is classified into three main fields: application plan, data plan, and control plan approaches. The verification mechanisms are compared with each other according to the important factors such as structural properties, quality‐of‐service metrics, applied algorithms, and measurement tools.

SDN Intent-based conformance checking: application to security policies

“…In this paper, we employ the term conformance checking to refer to the verification of high-level rule enforcement through execution traces, as it is commonly done in the business process community. We consider cases where the management plane does not have a deep understanding of the lower-level intricacies of the network and its models are thus too abstract to be directly used in traditional model checking [4]. This is often the case when decisions are taken by artificial intelligence [5].…”

Static Equivalence Checking for OpenFlow Networks

“…In terms of the techniques used in our method, there are various studies that used formal techniques in relation to SDN [10,11]. Reitblatt et al [12] proposed a rule tagging based update mechanism to ensure the consistency of packet forwarding.…”

“…Output flow from Switch1 is SF S1 (P). We can define the forwarding behavior of D NET with a given set of packet flows P, F B D NET (P) as (11) as follows:…”

Mutation boosted salp swarm optimizer meets rough set theory: A novel approach to software defect detection

“…However, they often suffer from issues such as high computational complexity, suboptimal performance, and limited ability to handle large-scale and high-dimensional datasets. 6,33 To address these challenges, this research proposes an improved feature selection for defect detection by using mutation boosted salp swarm optimizer (MBSSO) in conjunction with Rough Set Theory. MBSSO is inspired by the foraging behavior of salps, which exhibits efficient exploration and exploitation capabilities.…”

“…Automated methods, such as filter, wrapper, or embedded techniques, have been proposed to overcome these limitations. However, they often suffer from issues such as high computational complexity, suboptimal performance, and limited ability to handle large‐scale and high‐dimensional datasets 6,33 …”