Net Auto-Solver: A formal approach for automatic resolution of OpenFlow anomalies

Abstract

Policy anomalies are frequent in nowadays’s computer networks due to their increasing configuration complexity. Resolving policy anomalies usually requires network administrator intervention, which is a time-intensive and error-prone process. In this paper, we present Net Auto-Solver, a formal approach for automatic resolution of OpenFlow anomalies. The approach resorts to the concept of high-level policies to not only detect policy violations but also correct them on-the-fly. Our approach is fully automated and does not require interaction with the network administrator. Although there is a multitude of research works on detecting anomalies in SDN, research to correct those anomalies in an automatic manner is extremely scarce. At the heart of our approach, we propose two inference systems to perform corrective actions to the policy. We provide some experimental results involving real-life network configurations to show the performance of our approach. The first results are very promising.