How to Build DPI Products? (Part XII - A Network Programming Language)

      
A paper about Frenetic, a network programming language.

Led by Nate Foster, Alec Story from Cornell University; Rob Harrison, Michael J. Freedman, Christopher Monsanto, Jennifer Rexford and David Walker, Princeton University.

The paper was presented at ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), Tokyo, Japan, September 2011.

Abstract

Modern networks provide a variety of interrelated services including routing, traffic monitoring, load balancing, and access control. Unfortunately, the languages used to program today’s networks lack modern features—they are usually defined at the low level of abstraction supplied by the underlying hardware and they fail to provide even rudimentary support for modular programming. As a result, network programs tend to be complicated, error-prone, and difficult to maintain. This paper presents Frenetic, a high-level language for programming distributed collections of network switches. Frenetic provides a declarative query language for classifying and aggregating network traffic as well as a functional reactive combinator library for describing high-level packet-forwarding policies. Unlike prior work in this domain, these constructs are—by design—fully compositional, which facilitates modular reasoning and enables code reuse. This important property is enabled by Frenetic’s novel runtime system which manages all of the details related to installing, uninstalling, and querying low-level packet-processing rules on physical switches. Overall, this paper makes three main contributions: (1) We analyze the state-of-the art in languages for programming networks and identify the key limitations; (2) We present a language design that addresses these limitations, using a series of examples to motivate and validate our choices; (3)We describe an implementation of the language and evaluate its performance on several benchmarks.

See "Frenetic: A Network Programming Language" - here