Merlin: A Language for Provisioning Network Resources
  This paper presents Merlin, a new framework for managing resources in software-defined networks. With Merlin, administrators express high-level policies using programs in a declarative language. The language includes logical predicates to identify sets of packets, regular expressions to encode forwarding paths, and arithmetic formulas to specify bandwidth constraints. The Merlin compiler uses a combination of advanced techniques to translate these policies into code that can be executed on network elements including a constraint solver that allocates bandwidth using parameterizable heuristics. To facilitate dynamic adaptation, Merlin provides mechanisms for delegating control of sub-policies and for verifying that modifications made to sub-policies do not violate global constraints. Experiments demonstrate the expressiveness and scalability of Merlin on real-world topologies and applications. Overall, Merlin simplifies network administration by providing high-level abstractions for specifying network policies and scalable infrastructure for enforcing them. 
Robert Soul\'e and Shrutarshi Basu and Parisa Jalili Marandi and   Fernando Pedone and Robert Kleinberg and Emin G\"un Sirer...
cs.NI