On hardware programmable network dynamics with a chemistry-inspired abstraction

Abstract

Chemical algorithms are statistical control algorithms described and represented as chemical reaction networks. They are analytically tractable, they reinforce a deterministic state-to-dynamics relation, they have configurable stability properties, and they are directly implemented in state space using a high-level visual representation. These properties make them attractive solutions for traffic shaping and generally the control of dynamics in computer networks. In this paper, we present a framework for deploying chemical algorithms on field programmable gate arrays. Besides substantial computational acceleration, we introduce a low-overhead approach for hardware-level programmability and re-configurability of these algorithms at runtime, and without service interruption. We believe that this is a promising approach for expanding the control-plane programmability of software defined networks (SDN), to enable programmable network dynamics. To this end, the simple high-level abstractions of chemical algorithms offer an ideal northbound interface to the hardware, aligned with other programming primitives of SDN (e.g., flow rules).