Enabling Service-Oriented Programming for Multi-User in Polymorphic Network

Polymorphic networking (PINet) aims to support the coexistence and evolution of diverse services for the multi-user in a unified programmable environment. An efficient programming system plays a crucial role in realizing PINet, by which the network programs are deployed on the underlying heterogeneous devices. This article presents PINet's programming environment (PPE), a service-oriented programming environment for PINet with three major goals, that is, incremental, application-level, and coordination programming. PPE provides a one end-to-end service abstraction that allows programmers to express packet processing logic (e.g., forwarding and computing) without concern for the network topology and hardware details. PPE also proposes a network-wide compiler system with hierarchical architecture to deploy out-of-the-box services for the multi-user. We elaborately describe the PPE's goals, workflow, and challenges for our motivation. Some implementation details and open issues are discussed as future research directions.