Modeling and verifying SDN with multiple controllers

SDN (Software Defined Network) with multiple controllers draws more attention for the increasing scale of the network. The architecture can handle what SDN with single controller is not able to address. In order to understand what this architecture can accomplish and face precisely, we analyze it with formal methods. In this paper, we apply CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) to model the routing service of SDN under HyperFlow architecture based on OpenFlow protocol. By using model checker PAT (Process Analysis Toolkit), we verify that the models satisfy three properties, covering deadlock freeness, consistency and fault tolerance.