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Toward formally verifying congestion control behavior

Authors:

Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo,

Mohammad Alizadeh, and

Hari BalakrishnanAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

August 2021

Pages 1 - 16

https://doi.org/10.1145/3452296.3472912

Published: 09 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The diversity of paths on the Internet makes it difficult for designers and operators to confidently deploy new congestion control algorithms (CCAs) without extensive real-world experiments, but such capabilities are not available to most of the networking community. And even when they are available, understanding why a CCA underperforms by trawling through massive amounts of statistical data from network connections is challenging. The history of congestion control is replete with many examples of surprising and unanticipated behaviors unseen in simulation but observed on real-world paths. In this paper, we propose initial steps toward modeling and improving our confidence in a CCA's behavior. We have developed CCAC, a tool that uses formal verification to establish certain properties of CCAs. It is able to prove hypotheses about CCAs or generate counterexamples for invalid hypotheses. With CCAC, a designer can not only gain greater confidence prior to deployment to avoid unpleasant surprises, but can also use the counterexamples to iteratively improvetheir algorithm. We have modeled additive-increase/multiplicative-decrease (AIMD), Copa, and BBR with CCAC, and describe some surprising results from the exercise.

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Cited By

Carmel DKeslassy I(2024)Dragonfly: In-Flight CCA IdentificationIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2024.338041721:3(2675-2685)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2024.3380417
Aykurt KZerwas JBlenk AKellerer W(2024)When TCP Meets Reconfigurations: A Comprehensive Measurement StudyIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.332750821:2(1372-1386)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3327508
Gong FRaghunathan DGupta AApostolaki M(2023)Towards Integrating Formal Methods into ML-Based Systems for NetworkingProceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3626111.3628188(48-55)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626111.3628188
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Index Terms

Toward formally verifying congestion control behavior
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
    1. Transport protocols
2. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
    1. Automated reasoning

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

August 2021

868 pages

ISBN:9781450383837

DOI:10.1145/3452296

General Chairs:
Fernando Kuipers
Delft University of Technology
,
Matthew Caesar
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Copyright © 2021 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

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SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 09 August 2021

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Cited By

Carmel DKeslassy I(2024)Dragonfly: In-Flight CCA IdentificationIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2024.338041721:3(2675-2685)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2024.3380417
Aykurt KZerwas JBlenk AKellerer W(2024)When TCP Meets Reconfigurations: A Comprehensive Measurement StudyIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.332750821:2(1372-1386)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3327508
Gong FRaghunathan DGupta AApostolaki M(2023)Towards Integrating Formal Methods into ML-Based Systems for NetworkingProceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3626111.3628188(48-55)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626111.3628188
Pazhooheshy PAbbasloo SGanjali Y(2023)Harnessing ML For Network Protocol AssessmentProceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3626111.3628182(213-219)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626111.3628182
Fang TXu LSrisa-an W(2023)Efficient Verification of Timing-Related Network Functions in High-Speed HardwareIEEE INFOCOM 2023 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228994(1-10)Online publication date: 17-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228994
von Hippel MMcMillan KNita-Rotaru CZuck L(2023)A Formal Analysis of Karn’s AlgorithmNetworked Systems10.1007/978-3-031-37765-5_4(43-61)Online publication date: 22-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-37765-5_4
Aykurt KZerwas JBlenk AKellerer W(2022)On the Performance of TCP in Reconfigurable Data Center Networks2022 18th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM)10.23919/CNSM55787.2022.9964863(127-135)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.23919/CNSM55787.2022.9964863

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