Why and Where: A Characterization of Data Provenance
ICDT '01 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Database Theory
Locating internet routing instabilities
Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
ORCHESTRA: facilitating collaborative data sharing
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Studying black holes in the internet with Hubble
NSDI'08 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
On the provenance of non-answers to queries over extracted data
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data
Communications of the ACM - Scratch Programming for All
How to ConQueR why-not questions
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data
Efficient querying and maintenance of network provenance at internet-scale
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data
Debugging the data plane with anteater
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference
Frenetic: a network programming language
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
SOSP '11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
Tiresias: the database oracle for how-to queries
SIGMOD '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
Header space analysis: static checking for networks
NSDI'12 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
A NICE way to test openflow applications
NSDI'12 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Where is the debugger for my software-defined network?
Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
Automatic test packet generation
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
Hi-index | 0.00 |
When debugging an SDN, it is sometimes necessary to explain the absence of an event: why a certain rule was not installed, or why a certain packet did not arrive. Existing SDN debuggers offer some support for explaining the presence of events, usually by providing the equivalent of a "backtrace" in conventional debuggers, but they are not very good at answering "Why not?" questions: there is simply no starting point for a possible backtrace. In this paper, we show that the concept of negative provenance can be used to explain the absence of events in SDNs. Negative provenance relies on counterfactual reasoning to identify the conditions under which the missing event could have occurred. We outline a simple technique that can track negative provenance in SDNs, and we present a case study to illustrate how our technique can be used to answer concrete "Why not?" questions. Using our approach, it should be possible to build SDN debuggers that can explain both the presence and the absence of events.