Configuring sessions in programmable networks

The provision of advanced computational services within networks is rapidly becoming both feasible and economical. We present a general approach to the problem of configuring application sessions that require intermediate processing by showing how the session configuration problem can be transformed to a conventional shortest path problem for unicast sessions or to a conventional Steiner tree problem for multicast sessions. We show, through a series of examples, that the method can be applied to a wide variety of different situations.