A Lazy Evaluation Strategy for Assessing Network Device Configuration Correctness

Configuration validation is the process of automatically assessing whether the various configuration parameters of a network´s devices are set to appropriate values according to a set of formal constraints given beforehand. Virtually all automated validation solutions presented to date assume a centralized and complete knowledge of the network´s configuration to perform their analysis. We present an algorithm that automatically performs this evaluation, while still requiring the need for a centralized point of verification, this algorithm can analyze the constraints to evaluate, and reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred to that central location, pushing as much of the evaluation of each constraint locally on each device.