Diagnosing SDN Network Problems by Using Spectrum-Based Fault Localization Techniques

Software-defined network (SDN) is the recent advances of mitigation on improving network management flexibility and dynamic configurability. It is due to the separation of control plane and data plane and the controller software for arbitrary network configurations. However, such a flexible architecture still suffers from the inherent traits of software quality issues. Software testing and software related fault localization methods should be applied. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply spectrum-based fault localization (SFL) techniques for SDN problems and propose the SFL system framework to find the illogic rules and related procedure faults in SDN. We conduct evaluations on the standard SDN environment in OpenFlow and compare the related SFL techniques. The results show that the fault locations can be found precisely. In addition, we also develop a debugging tool that can search the error causes and feedback the information to the SDN controller for fixing the faulty conditions in time.