Procera: a language for high-level reactive network control

Abstract

Our previous experience building systems for implementing network policies in home and enterprise networks has revealed that the intuitive notion of network policy in these domains is inherently dynamic and stateful. Current configuration languages, both in traditional network architectures and in OpenFlow systems, are not expressive enough to capture these policies. As a result, most prototype OpenFlow systems lack a configurable interface and instead require operators to program in the system implementation language, often C++. We describe Procera, a control architecture for software-defined networking (SDN) that includes a declarative policy language based on the notion of functional reactive programming; we extend this formalism with both signals relevant for expressing high-level network policies in a variety of network settings, including home and enterprise networks, and a collection of constructs expressing temporal queries over event streams that occur frequently in network policies. Although sophisticated users can take advantage of Procera's full expressiveness by expressing network policies directly in Procera, simpler configuration interfaces (e.g., graphical user interfaces) can also easily be built on top of this formalism.