Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques, and Applications
Title | Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques, and Applications |
Publication Type | Journal Article |
Year of Publication | 2015 |
Authors | Qadir, J., Hasan, O. |
Journal | Communications Surveys Tutorials, IEEE |
Volume | 17 |
Pagination | 256-291 |
Date Published | Firstquarter |
ISSN | 1553-877X |
Keywords | applying formal methods, clean slate Internet design, Communities, computer networks, Computers, formal correctness, formal specifications, formal verification, Internet, Internet architecture, Internet community, Internet culture, Mathematics, network infrastructure, networking protocols, Protocols, SDN, Software, software defined networking, Tutorials |
Abstract | Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet, which began as a research experiment, was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, particularly for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification and to an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design-in particular, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm-offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods and present a survey of its applications to networking. |
URL | http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6873212/ |
DOI | 10.1109/COMST.2014.2345792 |
Citation Key | 6873212 |
- Internet community
- Tutorials
- software defined networking
- Software
- SDN
- Protocols
- networking protocols
- network infrastructure
- Mathematics
- Internet culture
- applying formal methods
- Internet architecture
- internet
- formal verification
- formal specifications
- formal correctness
- Computers
- computer networks
- Communities
- clean slate Internet design