Merlin: A Language for Provisioning Network Resources

This paper presents Merlin, a new framework for managing re-sources in software-defined networks. With Merlin, administra-tors express high-level policies using programs in a declarative lan-guage. The language includes logical predicates to identify sets of packets, regular expressions to encode forwarding paths, and arithmetic formulas to specify bandwidth constraints. The Merlin compiler maps these policies into a constraint problem that deter-mines bandwidth allocations using parameterizable heuristics. It then generates code that can be executed on the network elements to enforce the policies. To allow network tenants to dynamically adapt policies to their needs, Merlin provides mechanisms for del-egating control of sub-policies and for verifying that modifications made to sub-policies do not violate global constraints. Experiments demonstrate the expressiveness and effectiveness of Merlin on real-world topologies and applications. Overall, Merlin simplifies net-work administration by providing high-level abstractions for spec-ifying network policies that provision network resources