NETCDL: The Network Certification Description Language
Cody Hanson, Kristen R. Walcott · International Journal of Computational Science Information Technology and Control Engineering · 2018
Modern IP networks are complex entities that require constant maintenance and care.Similarly, constructing a new network comes with a high amount of upfront cost, planning, and risk.Unlike the disciplines of software and hardware engineering, networking and IT professionals lack an expressive and useful certification language that they can use to verify that their work is correct.When installing and maintaining networks without a standard for describing their behavior, teams find themselves prone to making configuration mistakes.These mistakes can have real monetary and operational efficiency costs for organizations that maintain large networks.In this research, the Network Certification Description Language (NETCDL) is proposed as an easily human readable and writeable language that is used to describe network components and their desired behavior.The complexity of the grammar is shown to rank in the top 5 out of 31 traditional computer language grammars, as measured by metrics suite.The language is also shown to be able to express the majority of common use cases in network troubleshooting.A workflow involving a certifier tool is proposed that uses NETCDL to verify network correctness, and a reference certifier design is presented to guide and standardize future implementations.