Toward formal methods in network management

Abstract

The purpose of developing formal methods for network management is to construct a methodology so that implementations of network management can be studied. Such studies lead to increased productivity in generating software for network management applications and toward increased efficiencies in running network management applications in the field. A process leading to an approach of developing formal methods for network management is proposed. This process introduces C.A.E Hoare's (1983) thoughts on the syntax of sequential computing processes along with Dijkstra's (1975) idea of "Guarded Variables". The result is a syntax which allows one to model execution of a sequential set of program statements and, in addition, has a nondeterministic property within the syntax to explicitly model decision points within the execution of statements where only one of multiple scenarios is followed in the sequence. From this base, network management can be modelled as a set of behaviors, whose semantics can be embedded within the above syntax. This representation is analogous to the idea of "reverse engineering" in cloning computer chips. Here, the external interactions of the target chip, like the observed behaviors of a network management system, are defined and then simulated through fundamentally different processes, while still producing identical interactions under like conditions. For the network management application, (taking access control as an example) control can be modeled as an interchange of functional commands across an interface by embedding the access control semantics within predicates and noting the decisions within the predicates through the nondeterministic syntax.