Weighted NetKAT: A Programming Language for Quantitative Network Verification
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.
Authors
- Nate Foster (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6557-684X)
- Tiago Ferreira (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6942-0228)
- Kevin Batz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8705-2564)
- Emmanuel Suárez Acevedo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5515-6099)
- Alexandra Silva (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5014-9784)
- Oliver Bøving (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-4702-2876)
Institutions
- Cornell University (US)
- Jane Street (United States)
- University College London (GB)
- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CH)
- Technical University of Denmark (DK)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
- Published
- 2026-06-08
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3808318
- Primary Topic
- Formal Methods in Verification
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- European Research Council