P4DDG: Data-Dependent Grammars for Packet Specification and Parsing in P4

In software-defined networking, the domain-specific language P4 allows developers to program the behavior of networking devices at a comparatively high level of abstraction. A P4 program defines a state machine to parse incoming packets. The parsers are flexible and efficient but may be sensitive to bugs and difficult to maintain. As a possible alternative, data-dependent grammars (DDGs) can describe both packet structure and parser at a higher level of abstraction.