Towards Programmable Network Dynamics: A Chemistry-Inspired Abstraction for Hardware Design

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a hardware implementation of chemical algorithms on FPGA, enabling real-time, reconfigurable control of network dynamics, which enhances performance and expands software-defined networking capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a direct FPGA implementation of chemical algorithms, achieving hardware-level programmability and reconfigurability for network control applications.

Findings

Significant performance improvements in chemical algorithm execution.

Achieved runtime reconfigurability without service interruption.

Enabled real-time control with sub-second latency.

Abstract

Chemical algorithms are statistical algorithms described and represented as chemical reaction networks. They are particularly attractive for traffic shaping and general control of network dynamics; they are analytically tractable, they reinforce a strict state-to-dynamics relationship, they have configurable stability properties, and they are directly implemented in state-space using a high-level (graphical) representation. In this paper, we present a direct implementation of chemical algorithms on FPGA hardware. Besides substantially improving performance, we have achieved hardware-level programmability and re-configurability of these algorithms at runtime (not interrupting servicing) and in realtime (with sub-second latency). This opens an interesting perspective for expanding the currently limited scope of software defined networking and network virtualisation solutions, to include programmable control of network dynamics.