Tibor Schneider
PhD Student
I am a first-year PhD student at ETH Zurich in the Networked Systems Group, advised by Prof. Dr. Laurent Vanbever. My current research focuses on the verification and synthesis of network configurations.
I have received my Master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from ETH Zurich. With my work during the Master's thesis, I explored approaches for planning and performing configuration updates in large-scale internet networks.
Recent Publications
Snowcap: Synthesizing Network-Wide Configuration Updates
ACM SIGCOMM 2021. Online (August 2021).
Large-scale reconfiguration campaigns tend to be nerve-racking for network operators as they can lead to significant network downtimes, decreased performance, and policy violations. Unfortunately, existing reconfiguration frameworks often fall short inpractice as they either only support a small set of reconfiguration scenarios or simply do not scale.
We address these problems with Snowcap, the first network reconfiguration framework which can synthesize configuration updates that comply with arbitrary hard and soft specifications, and involve arbitrary routing protocols. Our key contributionis an efficient search procedure which leverages counter-examples to efficiently navigate the space of configuration updates. Given a reconfiguration ordering which violates the desired specifications, our algorithm automatically identifies the problematic commands so that it can avoid this particular order in the next iteration.
We fully implemented Snowcap and extensively evaluated its scalability and effectiveness on real-world topologies and typical, large-scale reconfiguration scenarios. Even for large topologies, Snowcap finds a valid reconfiguration ordering with minimal side-effects (i.e., traffic shifts) within a few seconds at most.
