P4 Specific Refactoring Steps

Abstract

P4 is a domain-specific programming language for programmable switches running inside next-generation computer networks. The language is designed to use the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm which separates the data plane and the control plane layers of the program. The paper introduces tool-supported refactoring steps for P4. The challenge in this task is that P4 has special domain-specific constructs that cannot be found in other languages and as such there is no existing methodology yet for refactoring these constructs. The proposed steps are implemented using P4Query, an analyzer framework dedicated to P4.