Fast Verification of Network Configuration Updates

Abstract

With the expansion of network services, large-scale networks have progressively become common. The network status changes rapidly in response to customer needs and configuration changes, so network configuration changes are also very frequent. However, no matter what changes, the network must ensure the correct conditions, such as isolating tenants from each other or guaranteeing essential services. Once changes occur, it is necessary to verify the after-changed network. Whereas, for the verification of large-scale network configuration changes, many current verifiers show poor efficiency. In order to solve the problem of multiple global verifications caused by frequent updates of local configurations in large networks, we present a fast configuration updates verification tool, FastCUV, for distributed control planes. FastCUV aims to enhance the efficiency of distributed control plane verification for medium and large networks while ensuring correctness. This paper presents a method to determine the network range affected by the configuration change. We present a flow model and graph structure to facilitate the design of verification algorithms and speed up verification. Our scheme verifies the network area affected by obtaining the change of the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) before and after. FastCUV supports rich network attributes, meanwhile, has high efficiency and correctness performance. After experimental verification and result analysis, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method to a certain extent.