Title: The Design and Implementation of Declarative Networks
Boon Thau Loo
University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: As new and varied applications are developed and deployed on
the Internet, there is an increased pressure on the Internet to
provide better services and support new functionalities. In this talk,
I present the design and implementation of declarative networks, which
aims to address the lack of flexibility in today's Internet by
providing a declarative framework for rapid prototyping, development
and experimentation with new network designs. Declarative networks are
specified using a high-level recursive query language called Network
Datalog. These specifications are then compiled into efficient
distributed implementations. This approach provides ease and
compactness of specification, and offers additional benefits such as
optimizability and the potential for safety checks. I will describe
the use of declarative networks for building extensible routers, and
for rapid prototyping of new overlay networks. I will also discuss a
number of database research issues that arises in declarative
networking, in the areas of language semantics, distributed execution
strategies and query optimizations.