Real-time verification of wireless home networks using bigraphs with sharing

Abstract

Home wireless networks are difficult to manage and comprehend because of evolving locality, co-locality, connectivity and interaction. We define formal models of home wireless network infrastructure and policies and investigate how they can be used in a network management system designed to provide user-oriented support. We model spatial and temporal behaviour of network interactions and user-initiated network policies and define an online framework for generation of models from network and user-initiated events. The models are expressed in an extension to Milnerʼs bigraphical reactive systems. Analysis of the models is carried out in real-time by a bespoke bigraph reasoning system based on checking predicates, which is encoded as bigraph matching. Real-time model generation and analysis is implemented on the experimental Homework system router and trialled with synthetic and actual network data.