Modular Data Plane Verification for Compositional Networks

Abstract

Modern networks are increasingly using layering and bridging to form a compositional architecture. Layering protocols like VXLAN create multiple overlay networks on top of a single underlay network infrastructure. This makes network configurations even more complex, and error-prone. To check the correctness of such compositional networks, one needs to model the dependency across multiple layers (underlay and overlay) and multiple domains (different VPNs/VPCs). Existing verifiers, which are optimized to scale in single-layer single-domain networks, exhibit scalability limitations when applied to compositional networks. This paper proposes MNV, a modular network verifier that scales to large compositional networks. At its core is a new verification method termed decompose-merge reasoning, which decomposes the network into self-contained modules, verifies each module independently, and merges the verification results. Our experiments show that for a typical data center network virtualized with VXLAN, to check reachability for more than 100 million pairs of subnets, MNV is at least 100x faster than state-of-the-art tools.