Weighted NetKAT: A Programming Language For Quantitative Network Verification

2026-04-15

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of a unified formal language for modeling and automatically reasoning about quantitative network properties such as delay, bandwidth, and packet loss. The authors propose a domain-specific language based on semiring parameterization, equipped with denotational semantics and an operational semantics grounded in weighted NetKAT automata (WNKA). This framework enables fully automated verification of quantitative safety and reachability properties for network programs involving unbounded iteration. By establishing a unified formal foundation, the approach supports precise reasoning over a broad class of quantitative attributes. Experimental evaluation on the real-world Abilene network topology demonstrates its effectiveness, successfully verifying diverse quantitative properties and confirming its capability for efficient, automated quantitative verification at scale in practical network environments.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Qualitative Reasoning
• Machine Learning: Calibration & Uncertainty Quantification
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Model-Based Reasoning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

We introduce weighted NetKAT, a domain-specific language for modeling and verifying quantitative network properties. The language is parametric on a semiring, enabling the treatment of a wide range of quantities in a uniform way. We provide a denotational semantics and an equivalent operational semantics, the latter based on a novel model of weighted NetKAT automata (WNKA) capturing the stateful behavior of our language. With WNKA, we obtain a class of generic decision procedures for reasoning about quantitative safety and reachability in a fully automatic way, even in the presence of possibly unbounded iteration. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in a case study using Internet2's Abilene network as the underlying topology.

Problem

• quantitative network verification
• weighted NetKAT
• network safety
• reachability
• semiring

Innovation

• Weighted NetKAT
• semiring
• quantitative verification
• WNKA
• network safety