Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a networking paradigm that has become increasingly popular in the last decade. The unprecedented control over the global behaviour of the network it provides opens a range of new opportunities for formal methods and much work has appeared in the last few years on providing bridges between SDN and verification. This article advances this research line and provides a link between SDN and traditional work on formal methods for verification of concurrent and distributed software—actor-based modelling. We show how SDN programs can be seamlessly modelled using actors, and thus existing advanced model checking techniques developed for actors can be directly applied to verify a range of properties of SDNs, including consistency of flow tables, violation of safety policies, and forwarding loops. Our model checker for SDNs is available through an online web interface, that also provides the SDN actor-models for a number of well-known SDN benchmarks.

软件定义网络（SDN）是一种网络范例，在过去十年中变得越来越流行。它提供的对网络全局行为的空前控制为形式化方法带来了一系列新机会，并且在最近几年中，在提供SDN与验证之间的桥梁方面已经出现了许多工作。本文推进了这一研究领域，并提供了SDN与基于形式化方法验证并发和分布式软件的传统方法之间的链接-基于行为者的建模。我们展示了如何使用actor对SDN程序进行无缝建模，因此可以将直接为参与者开发的现有高级模型检查技术直接应用于验证SDN的一系列属性，包括流表的一致性，违反安全策略和转发循环。我们的SDN模型检查器可通过在线Web界面获得，该界面还提供了许多著名SDN基准测试的SDN参与者模型。