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Published on May 12, 2020

Best Paper at NOMS

PPGC's students Karine Birnfeld and Diogo Campos received the Best Paper Award at NOMS, the most prestigious symposium on network operations and management.

PPGC’s students Karine Birnfeld and Diogo Campos received the Best Paper Award at NOMS, the most prestigious symposium on network operations and management.

Their work entitled “P4 Switch Code Data Flow Analysis: Towards Stronger Verification of Forwarding Plane Software”, supervised by Professor Weverton Cordeiro (PPGC) and Professor Breno de França (Unicamp), received the Best Paper Award at the 17th IEEE / IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2020). The symposium was held from April 20 to 24th, as a virtual conference, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The work expands the scope of existing solutions for verification of written software for programmable routing plans, evaluating the potential of data flow analysis – a  well-known technique in the software engineering literature – in the verification task, without requiring extra effort from the programmer for this purpose. Birnfeld, lead co-author, says that researching the intersection between Software Engineering (her area of expertise before her master’s degree) and Computer Networks was a challenging task that took her out of her comfort zone. “The award for best paper is an important and rewarding confirmation that we are in the right direction to provide stronger software verification and validation for programmable data plans, placing less burden on network developers,” she says.

Professor Cordeiro emphasizes the importance of research and collaboration between UFRGS and UNICAMP, emphasizing that “data communication networks are a critical component of our digital society and, as we enter an era in which network operators can write your network software, high quality testing becomes paramount. Since preliminary discussions with Prof. França, an experienced Software Engineering researcher, we saw an opportunity to apply the knowledge acquired in software testing in this context and complement the research published in important places like ACM SIGCOMM ” said Cordeiro. “The research was funded by the National Science Foundation of the USA, CAPES and the National Education and Research Network (RNP). Held in even years since 1988, the IEEE / IFIP NOMS is a highly selective event that received 241 submissions, of which 72 were accepted ”.