research-article

Frenetic: a network programming language

Authors:

Michael J. Freedman,

Christopher Monsanto,

Jennifer Rexford,

David WalkerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 46, Issue 9

Pages 279 - 291

https://doi.org/10.1145/2034574.2034812

Published: 19 September 2011 Publication History

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 run-time 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.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (_talk2.mp4)

Download
61.45 MB

References

[1]

Beacon: A java-based OpenFlow control platform. See http://www.beaconcontroller.net, Nov 2010.

[2]

The Frenetic language. See http://www.frenetic-lang.org/, Nov 2010.

[3]

OpenFlow. See http://www.openflowswitch.org, Nov 2010.

[4]

SNAC. See http://snacsource.org/, 2010.

[5]

Umut A. Acar, Guy E. Blelloch, and Robert Harper. Adaptive functional programming. TOPLAS, 28:990--1034, November 2006.

Digital Library

[6]

Arvind Arasu, Shivanth Babu, and Jennifer Widom. The CQL continuous query language: Semantic foundations and query execution. The VLDB Journal, 15:121--142, Jun 2006.

Digital Library

[7]

Gérard Berry and Georges Gonthier. The Esterel synchronous programming language: Design, semantics, implementation. Science of Computer Programming, (2):87--152, 1992.

Digital Library

[8]

Zheng Cai, Alan L. Cox, and T. S. Eugene Ng. Maestro: A system for scalable OpenFlow control. Technical Report TR10-08, Rice University, Dec 2010.

[9]

Martin Casado, Michael J. Freedman, Justin Pettit, Jianying Luo, Natasha Gude, Nick McKeown, and Scott Shenker. Rethinking enterprise network control. Trans. on Networking., 17(4), Aug 2009.

Digital Library

[10]

Michael K. Chen, Xiao Feng Li, Ruiqi Lian, Jason H. Lin, Lixia Liu, Tao Liu, and Roy Ju. Shangri-la: Achieving high performance from compiled network applications while enabling ease of programming. In PLDI, pages 224--236, Jun 2005.

Digital Library

[11]

Gregory H. Cooper and Shriram Krishnamurthi. Embedding dynamic dataflow in a call-by-value language. In ESOP, pages 294--308, 2006.

Digital Library

[12]

Antony Courtney, Henrik Nilsson, and John Peterson. The Yampa arcade. In Haskell Workshop, pages 7--18, Aug 2003.

Digital Library

[13]

Chuck Cranor, Theodore Johnson, Oliver Spataschek, and Vladislav Shkapenyuk. Gigascope: A stream database for network applications. In SIGMOD, pages 647--651, 2003.

Digital Library

[14]

Mihai Lucian Cristea, Claudiu Zissulescu, Ed Deprettere, and Herbert Bos. FPL-3E: Towards language support for reconfigurable packet processing. In SAMOS, pages 201--212. Jul 2005.

[15]

Mihai Dobrescu, Norbert Egi, Katerina Argyraki, Byung-Gon Chun, Kevin Fall, Gianluca Iannaccone, Allan Knies, Maziar Manesh, and Sylvia Ratnasamy. RouteBricks: Exploiting parallelism to scale software routers. In SOSP, Oct 2009.

Digital Library

[16]

Sergei Egorov and Gene Savchuk. SNORTRAN: An Optimizing Compiler for Snort Rules. Fidelis Security Systems, 2002.

[17]

Conal Elliott and Paul Hudak. Functional reactive animation. In ICFP, pages 163--173, Jun 1997.

Digital Library

[18]

David Erickson et al. A demonstration of virtual machine mobility in an OpenFlow network, Aug 2008. Demo at ACM SIGCOMM.

[19]

Nate Foster, Rob Harrison, Matthew L. Meola, Michael J. Freedman, Jennifer Rexford, and David Walker. Frenetic: A high-level langauge for OpenFlow networks. In PRESTO, Nov 2010.

Digital Library

[20]

Natasha Gude, Teemu Koponen, Justin Pettit, Ben Pfaff, Martín Casado, Nick McKeown, and Scott Shenker. NOX: Towards an operating system for networks. SIGCOMM CCR, 38(3), 2008.

Digital Library

[21]

Nikhil Handigol, Srinivasan Seetharaman, Mario Flajslik, Nick McKeown, and Ramesh Johari. Plug-n-Serve: Load-balancing web traffic using OpenFlow, Aug 2009. Demo at ACM SIGCOMM.

[22]

Brandon Heller, Srini Seetharaman, Priya Mahadevan, Yiannis Yiakoumis, Puneet Sharma, Sujata Banerjee, and Nick McKeown. ElasticTree: Saving energy in data center networks. In NSDI, Apr 2010.

Digital Library

[23]

Timothy L. Hinrichs, Natasha S. Gude, Martin Casado, John C. Mitchell, and Scott Shenker. Practical declarative network management. In WREN, pages 1--10, 2009.

Digital Library

[24]

Eddie Kohler, Robert Morris, Benjie Chen, John Jannotti, and M. Frans Kaashoek. The Click modular router. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 18(3):263--297, Aug 2000.

Digital Library

[25]

Teemu Koponen, Martin Casado, Natasha Gude, Jeremy Stribling, Leon Poutievski, Min Zhu, Rajiv Ramanathan, Yuichiro Iwata, Hiroaki Inoue, Takayuki Hama, and Scott Shenker. Onix: A distributed control platform for large-scale production networks. In OSDI, Oct 2010.

Digital Library

[26]

Bob Lantz, Brandon Heller, and Nick McKeown. A network in a laptop: Rapid prototyping for software-defined networks. In HotNets, pages 1--6, 2010.

Digital Library

[27]

Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Petros Maniatis, Timothy Roscoe, and Ion Stoica. Implementing declarative overlays. SIGOPS, 39(5):75--90, 2005.

Digital Library

[28]

Boon Thau Loo, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Ion Stoica, and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Declarative routing: Extensible routing with declarative queries. In SIGCOMM, pages 289--300, 2005.

Digital Library

[29]

Geoffrey Mainland, Greg Morrisett, and Matt Welsh. Flask: Staged functional programming for sensor networks. In ICFP, pages 335--346, 2008.

Digital Library

[30]

John Markoff. Open networking foundation pursues new standards. The New York Times, Mar 2011. See http://nyti.ms/eK3CCK.

[31]

Nick McKeown, Tom Anderson, Hari Balakrishnan, Guru Parulkar, Larry Peterson, Jennifer Rexford, Scott Shenker, and Jonathan Turner. Openflow: Enabling innovation in campus networks. SIGCOMM CCR, 38(2):69--74, 2008.

Digital Library

[32]

Leo A. Meyerovich, Arjun Guha, Jacob Baskin, Gregory H. Cooper, Michael Greenberg, Aleks Bromfield, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. Flapjax: A programming language for Ajax applications. In OOPSLA, pages 1--20, 2009.

Digital Library

[33]

Ankur Nayak, Alex Reimers, Nick Feamster, and Russ Clark. Resonance: Dynamic access control in enterprise networks. In WREN, Aug 2009.

Digital Library

[34]

Henrik Nilsson, Antony Courtney, and John Peterson. Functional reactive programming, continued. In Haskell Workshop, pages 51--64, Oct 2002.

Digital Library

[35]

Vern Paxson. Bro: A system for detecting network intruders in real-time. Computer Networks, 31(23-24):2435--2463, Dec 1999.

Digital Library

[36]

John Peterson, Paul Hudak, and Conal Elliott. Lambda in motion: Controlling robots with Haskell. In PADL, Jan 1999.

Digital Library

[37]

Robert Soulé, Martin Hirzel, Robert Grimm, Buǧra Gedik, Henrique Andrade, Vibhore Kumar, and Kun-Lung Wu. A universal calculus for stream processing languages. In ESOP, pages 507--528, 2010.

Digital Library

[38]

William Thies, Michal Karczmarek, and Saman Amarasinghe. Streamit: A language for streaming applications. In International Conference on Compiler Construction, pages 179--196, Apr 2002.

Digital Library

[39]

Andreas Voellmy and Paul Hudak. Nettle: Functional reactive programming of OpenFlow networks. In PADL, Jan 2011.

[40]

Richard Wang, Dana Butnariu, and Jennifer Rexford. OpenFlow-based server load balancing gone wild. In Hot-ICE, Mar 2011.

Digital Library

Cited By

Vaghela GSanghani NBorisaniya B(2024)Review on DDoS Attack in Controller Environment of Software Defined NetworkICST Transactions on Scalable Information Systems10.4108/eetsis.582311Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsis.5823
Agnew DBoamah SBretas AMcNair J(2024)Network Security Challenges and Countermeasures for Software-Defined Smart Grids: A SurveySmart Cities10.3390/smartcities70400857:4(2131-2181)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities7040085
Wen CLi ZJafri SQiu XRao S(2024)P4CGO: Control Plane Guided P4 Program OptimizationProceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Workshop on Formal Methods Aided Network Operation10.1145/3672199.3673892(1-7)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672199.3673892
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Frenetic: a network programming language
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Context specific languages
      1. Specialized application languages

Recommendations

NetKAT: semantic foundations for networks
POPL '14

Recent years have seen growing interest in high-level languages for programming networks. But the design of these languages has been largely ad hoc, driven more by the needs of applications and the capabilities of network hardware than by foundational ...
Frenetic: a network programming language
ICFP '11: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

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 ...
Language support for verifiable SDNs
SPLASH Companion 2016: Companion Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity

Programming languages for Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) provide higher abstractions on top of hardware-based APIs like OpenFlow. Researchers started to develop SDN programming languages based on mathematical foundations, which makes these languages ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 9

ICFP '11

September 2011

456 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2034574

Issue’s Table of Contents

ICFP '11: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
September 2011
470 pages
ISBN:9781450308656
DOI:10.1145/2034773
General Chairs:
Manuel Chakravarty
University of New South Wales, Australia
,
Zhenjiang Hu
National Institute of Informatics, Japan
,
Program Chair:
Olivier Danvy
Aarhus University, Denmark

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 September 2011

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 46, Issue 9

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

530
Total Citations
View Citations
2,513
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)147
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)16

Reflects downloads up to 10 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Vaghela GSanghani NBorisaniya B(2024)Review on DDoS Attack in Controller Environment of Software Defined NetworkICST Transactions on Scalable Information Systems10.4108/eetsis.582311Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsis.5823
Agnew DBoamah SBretas AMcNair J(2024)Network Security Challenges and Countermeasures for Software-Defined Smart Grids: A SurveySmart Cities10.3390/smartcities70400857:4(2131-2181)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities7040085
Wen CLi ZJafri SQiu XRao S(2024)P4CGO: Control Plane Guided P4 Program OptimizationProceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Workshop on Formal Methods Aided Network Operation10.1145/3672199.3673892(1-7)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672199.3673892
Larisch JThijm TAhmad SWu PArnfeld TFayed MSekar VYu MSeneviratne AVeitch D(2024)Topaz: Declarative and Verifiable Authoritative DNS at CDN-ScaleProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672240(891-903)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651890.3672240
Bajaber OJi BGao P(2024)P4Control: Line-Rate Cross-Host Attack Prevention via In-Network Information Flow Control Enabled by Programmable Switches and eBPF2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP54263.2024.00147(4610-4628)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP54263.2024.00147
Kanwal ANizamuddin MIqbal WAman WAbbas YMussiraliyeva S(2024)Exploring Security Dynamics in SDN Controller Architectures: Threat Landscape and ImplicationsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.339096812(56517-56553)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3390968
Agnew DAguila AMcnair J(2024)Enhanced Network Metric Prediction for Machine Learning-Based Cyber Security of a Software-Defined UAV Relay NetworkIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.338772812(54202-54219)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3387728
Chen S(2024)Choate: Toward High-Level, Cross-Layer SDN ProgrammingNetwork Simulation and Evaluation10.1007/978-981-97-4522-7_7(102-117)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-4522-7_7
Benavides Castillo LCastro González C(2024)Design and Implementation of an Open Daylight Event Management System Through the Integration of a Business Process ManagementInternational Conference on Applied Technologies10.1007/978-3-031-58950-8_16(226-238)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58950-8_16
ALASALI TDAKKAK O(2023)EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE OF SDN-BASED DDOS DEFENSE: A HOLISTIC EXAMINATION OF DETECTION AND MITIGATION APPROACHES, RESEARCH GAPS AND PROMISING AVENUES FOR FUTURE EXPLORATIONInternational Journal of Advanced Natural Sciences and Engineering Researches10.59287/ijanser.7267:4(327-349)Online publication date: 22-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.59287/ijanser.726
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents