A Vision for Runtime Programmable Networks
Jiarong Xing, Yiming Qiu, Kuo-Feng Hsu, Hongyi Liu, Matty Kadosh, Alan Lo, Aditya Akella, Thomas E. Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, T. S. Eugene Ng, Ang Chen · 2021
Our community has made significant progress in developing programmable network infrastructure, starting from the control plane and expanding to the data plane. As a latest trend, network devices are becoming runtime programmable while serving live traffic. This allows for reprogramming of individual device programs at fine-grained timescales to add or remove network functions. Many applications and services, however, need control over a combination of devices, including end host stacks, NICs, and switches, to accomplish their goals. We lay out our vision for runtime programmable networks, building upon device-level features to provide live, network-wide, runtime reprogramming. A whole-stack approach is needed with new programming models, compiler support, and network management abstractions. We outline a research agenda as a call to arms to the community.