Applying formal methods to networking: theory, techniques, and applications

The work

TitleApplying formal methods to networking: theory, techniques, and applications
AuthorsJunaid Qadir; Osman Hasan
Typearticle
Year2015
Also known asqadir2014applying
Citekeyqadir2015applying

Where it appeared

Published inIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
PublisherIEEE
Volume17
Issue1
Pages256--291

Identifiers

DOI10.1109/comst.2014.2345792
OpenAlexW2105589190

Access

Landing pagehttps://doi.org/10.1109/comst.2014.2345792
Free full texthttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.4303

Abstract

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet, which began as a research experiment, was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, particularly for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification and to an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design—in particular, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm—offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods and present a survey of its applications to networking.

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Where it came fromhttps://doi.org/10.1109/comst.2014.2345792

Where this came from

How it got herealready cited · cited in bibtex
First seen2026-08-04
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Approved2026-08-18

Cite it as

@article{qadir2015applying,
  title = {Applying formal methods to networking: theory, techniques, and applications},
  author = {Junaid Qadir and Osman Hasan},
  year = {2015},
  journal = {IEEE Communications Surveys \& Tutorials},
  volume = {17},
  number = {1},
  pages = {256--291},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/comst.2014.2345792},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.4303},
}

This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/qadir2015applying/ and will keep doing so. It used to be called qadir2014applying, and those addresses still resolve to this one.