research-article

Frenetic: a network programming language

Authors:

Michael J. Freedman,

Christopher Monsanto,

Jennifer Rexford,

David WalkerAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '11: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Pages 279 - 291

https://doi.org/10.1145/2034773.2034812

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.

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Dongarra JTourancheau BOssen SMusser JDalessandro LSwany M(2023)INDIANA—In-Network Distributed Infrastructure for Advanced Network ApplicationsInternational Journal of High Performance Computing Applications10.1177/1094342023117966237:3-4(442-461)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
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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

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

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

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

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]

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Published: 19 September 2011

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ICFP '11

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ICFP '11: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 19 - 21, 2011

Tokyo, Japan

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ICFP '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 92 submissions, 36%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

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ICFP '25

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sigplan

ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

Singapore , Singapore

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Cited By

Moeller MJacobs JBelanger ODarais DSchlesinger CSmolka SFoster NSilva A(2024)KATch: A Fast Symbolic Verifier for NetKATProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564548:PLDI(1905-1928)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656454
Dongarra JTourancheau BOssen SMusser JDalessandro LSwany M(2023)INDIANA—In-Network Distributed Infrastructure for Advanced Network ApplicationsInternational Journal of High Performance Computing Applications10.1177/1094342023117966237:3-4(442-461)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1177/10943420231179662
Bringhenti DMarchetto GSisto RValenza F(2023)Automation for Network Security Configuration: State of the Art and Research TrendsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/361640156:3(1-37)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3616401
Valluripally SFrailey BKruse BPalipatana BOruche RGulhane AHoque KCalyam P(2023)Detection of Security and Privacy Attacks Disrupting User Immersive Experience in Virtual Reality Learning EnvironmentsIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2022.321653916:4(2559-2574)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2022.3216539
Xu LZhang YChinprutthiwong PGu G(2023)Automatic Synthesis of Network Security Services: A First Step2023 32nd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)10.1109/ICCCN58024.2023.10230115(1-10)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN58024.2023.10230115
Greenberg MBeckett RCampbell EJhala RDillig I(2022)Kleene algebra modulo theories: a framework for concrete KATsProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523722(594-608)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3519939.3523722
Jepsen TFattaholmanan AMoshref MFoster NCarzaniga ASoule R(2022)Forwarding and Routing With Packet SubscriptionsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.317206630:6(2464-2479)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2022.3172066
Li HZhang PSun GCao WHu CShan DPan TFu Q(2022)Compiling Cross-Language Network Programs Into Hybrid Data PlaneIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2021.313230330:3(1088-1103)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2021.3132303
Pan HLi ZZhang PCui PSalamatian KXie G(2022)Misconfiguration-Free Compositional SDN for Cloud NetworksIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.3185096(1-17)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2022.3185096
Bannour FSouihi SMellouk A(2022)ReferencesSoftware‐Defined Networking10.1002/9781394186181.refs(121-137)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2022
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