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The development of programmable switches such as the Intel Tofino has allowed network designers to implement a wide range of new in-network applications and network control logic. However, current switch programming languages, like P4, operate at a very low level of abstraction. This paper introduces SwitchLog, a new experimental logic programming language designed to lift the level of abstraction at which network programmers operate, while remaining amenable to efficient implementation on programmable switches. SwitchLog is inspired by previous distributed logic programming languages such as NDLog, in which programmers declare a series of facts, each located at a particular switch in the network. Logic programming rules that operate on facts at different locations implicitly generate network communication, and are updated incrementally, as packets pass through a switch. In order to ensure these updates can be implemented efficiently on switch hardware, SwitchLog imposes several restrictions on the way programmers can craft their rules. We demonstrate that SwitchLog can be used to express a variety of networking applications in a mere handful of lines of code. 

Network architects are frequently presented with a tradeoff: either (a) introduce a new or improved control-/management plane application that boosts overall performance, or (b) use the bandwidth it would have occupied to deliver user traffic. In this paper, we present OrbWeaver, a framework that can exploit unused network bandwidth for in-network coordination. Using real hardware, we demonstrate that OrbWeaver can harvest this bandwidth (1) with little-to-no impact on the bandwidth/latency of user packets and (2) while providing guarantees on the interarrival time of the injected traffic. Through an exploration of three example use cases, we show that this opportunistic coordination abstraction is sufficient to approximate recently proposed systems without any of their associated bandwidth overheads.