The Frenetic Project: Declarative Languages for Programming Networks

For decades, traditional network devices such as switches, firewalls, load bal-ancers and routers have been closed, proprietary platforms controlled by the major hardware vendors. Each device contains a combination of (1) hardware to forward packets efficiently along chosen network paths, and (2) software to run the distributed protocols that decide which network paths to choose. To config-ure or specialize these devices, network operators have had to learn a myriad of complex, vendor-specific interfaces and protocols. Moreover, there was no easy way to change the basic distributed routing algorithms these network devices implement. Over the last few years, however, software-defined networking (SDN) has taken both the academic and industrial networking communities by storm. In a software-defined network, each switch exports a simple, standard and relatively direct interface to its underlying hardware. These switches are organized and managed by a separate, logically centralized controller machine or cluster of machines. A controller runs a general-purpose computation that reacts to net