A Forwarding-Path-Aware Sampling Strategy for Config2Spec

Network specification plays an important role for network management tasks, such as configuration verification, synthesis, repair and network change. Although Config2Spec has proposed an efficient mining workflow by combining the power of data plane analysis and control plane verification, the sampling strategy for selecting the next failure environment proposed only considers the effect of link's crossing policies. To further improve the efficiency of mining process, in this paper, we propose a forwarding-path-aware sampling strategy for Config2Spec. By considering both the effect of forwarding paths and crossing policies, we assign an exponential decreasing weight to the links in a forwarding path. Thus the mining process can analyze more new forwarding path with fewer sampling steps. The comprehensive experiments on real topologies (Bics and Columbus) demonstrates the effectiveness of the forwarding-path-aware sampling strategy. Compared with the policy-based sampling strategy, the forwarding-path-aware sampling strategy improves the efficiency of mining process by 11.52% to 40.85%.