Detecting network load violations for distributed control planes

Abstract

One of the major challenges faced by network operators pertains to whether their network can meet input traffic demand, avoid overload, and satisfy service-level agreements. Automatically verifying if no network links are overloaded is complicated---requires modeling frequent network failures, complex routing and load-balancing technologies, and evolving traffic requirements. We present QARC, a distributed control plane abstraction that can automatically verify whether a control plane may cause link-load violations under failures. QARC is fully automatic and can help operators program networks that are more resilient to failures and upgrade the network to avoid violations. We apply QARC to real datacenter and ISP networks and find interesting cases of load violations. QARC can detect violations in under an hour.