Network service providers rely on network functions (NFs) for security, performance optimization, and traffic management. User traffic typically traverses a chain of these functions to satisfy both user-level and infrastructure requirements. Traditionally, NFs have been implemented either in flexible software or in high-performance fixed-function hardware, leading to a tradeoff between agility and efficiency. The advent of programmable networking hardware offers a new balance between flexibility and performance, enabling the deployment of NFs directly on commodity devices such as programmable switches, SmartNICs, and DPUs. However, programming these devices remains challenging due to limited compute and memory resources and the diversity of their architectures and abstractions.We introduce SALAD-Nets, a framework that automatically maps virtual NF chains onto heterogeneous programmable infrastructures. Given a high-level specification of a virtual network of NFs, SALAD-Nets generates both the deployment plan and the acceleration code for each target device, respecting infrastructure constraints and user objectives. The poster presents the architecture and workflow of SALAD-Nets, showing how it addresses the dual challenges of automatic NF code generation and distributed deployment across diverse programmable hardware.

The Internet today is mainly used for distributing content, in a fundamental departure from its original goal of enabling communication between endpoints. As a response to this change, Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new architecture rooted on the concept of naming data, in contrast to the original paradigm based on naming hosts. This radical architectural shift results in packet processing in NDN to differ substantially from IP. As a consequence, current network equipment cannot be seamlessly extended to offer NDN data-plane functions. To address this challenge, available NDN router solutions are usually software-based, and even the highly-optimised designs tailored to specific hardware platforms present limited performance, hindering adoption. In addition, these tailor-made solutions are hardly reusable in research and production networks. The emergence of programmable switching chips and of languages to program them, like P4, brings hope for the state of affairs to change. In this paper, we present the design of an NDN router written in P4. We improve over the state-of-the-art solution by extending the NDN functionality, and by addressing its scalability limitations. A preliminary evaluation of our open-source solution running on a software target demonstrates its feasibility.