Verifying maximum link loads in a changing world


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Date

2025-04

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

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Data

Abstract

To meet ever more stringent requirements, network operators often need to reason about worst-case link loads. Doing so involves analyzing traffic forwarding after failures and BGP route changes. State-of-the-art systems identify failure scenarios causing congestion, but they ignore route changes. We present Viper, the first verification system that efficiently finds maximum link loads under failures and route changes. The key building block of Viper is its ability to massively reduce the gigantic space of possible route changes thanks to (i) a router-based abstraction for route changes, (ii) a theoretical characterization of scenarios leading to worst-case link loads, and (iii) an approximation of input traffic matrices. We fully implement and extensively evaluate Viper. Viper takes only a few minutes to accurately compute all worst-case link loads in large ISP networks. It thus provides operators with critical support to robustify network configurations, improve network management and take business decisions.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Proceedings of the 22nd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ’25)

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

1269 - 1287

Publisher

USENIX Association

Event

22nd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2025)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

09477 - Vanbever, Laurent / Vanbever, Laurent check_circle

Notes

Funding

851809 - From Network Verification to Synthesis: Breaking New Ground in Network Automation (EC)

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