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conference paper

A NICE Way to Test OpenFlow Applications

Canini, Marco  
•
Venzano, Daniele  
•
Peresini, Peter  
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2012
Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI)
The 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI)

The emergence of OpenFlow-capable switches enables exciting new network functionality, at the risk of programming errors that make communication less reliable. The centralized programming model, where a single controller program manages the network, seems to reduce the likelihood of bugs. However, the system is inherently distributed and asynchronous, with events happening at different switches and end hosts, and inevitable delays affecting communication with the controller. In this paper, we present efficient, systematic techniques for testing unmodified controller programs. Our NICE tool applies model checking to explore the state space of the entire system—the controller, the switches, and the hosts. Scalability is the main challenge, given the diversity of data packets, the large system state, and the many possible event orderings. To address this, we propose a novel way to augment model checking with symbolic execution of event handlers (to identify representative packets that exercise code paths on the controller). We also present a simplified OpenFlow switch model (to reduce the state space), and effective strategies for generating event interleavings likely to uncover bugs. Our prototype tests Python applications on the popular NOX platform. In testing three real applications—a MAC-learning switch, in-network server load balancing, and energy-efficient traffic engineering—we uncover eleven bugs.

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Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Canini, Marco  
Venzano, Daniele  
Peresini, Peter  
Kostic, Dejan  
Rexford, Jennifer
Date Issued

2012

Published in
Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI)
ISBN of the book

978-931971-92-8

Start page

127

End page

140

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
NSL  
Event nameEvent date
The 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI)

April 2012

Available on Infoscience
December 14, 2011
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/73165
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