Formal Methods for Network Performance Analysis

Explore a groundbreaking approach to network performance analysis using formal methods in this 15-minute conference talk from NSDI '23. Delve into the challenges of accurate and thorough network performance analysis, and discover how formal methods can overcome limitations of traditional simulation and emulation techniques. Learn how to model network components and queues in logic, and use program synthesis to automatically generate concise, interpretable workloads for performance metric queries. Understand the advantages of this approach in exhaustively analyzing network performance, particularly for algorithms and protocols expressible in first-order logic. Examine case studies demonstrating the effectiveness of formal methods in analyzing packet scheduling algorithms and a small leaf-spine network, revealing potential issues in throughput, fairness, starvation, and latency.