Program Synthesis for Programmable Data Planes

Abstract

An all-important step in the ambitious pursuit towards autonomous networks has been the introduction of Software Defined Networking which has advocated the concept of separating a network’s control plane from the data plane and creating a programmable controller with a wider view of the network. This innovation proved to be very promising, but the non-programmable data plane quickly became a limitation. 
The next step was brought by the emergence of the programmable switch architecture and P4, a language specifically designed for defining the behaviour of programmable network devices. P4 is a remarkably powerful language that allows the software developer to define almost any packet-processing functionality, all while abstracting away from the specifics of the target’s hardware architecture.
Despite its many benefits, P4 brings with it an additional layer of complexity for the network administrators, which may find themselves overwhelmed by having to learn a new programming language.
This report tackles this issue by presenting a prototype that is capable of synthesizing small P4 programs from pairs of input & output packets. Under the hood, the proposed solution uses a bottom-up enumerative synthesizer called Probe. This synthesizer was re-implemented, improved, and tailored to leverage the particularities of the problem domain.