NetPaxos

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of implementing the widely deployed Paxos consensus protocol in network devices. We present two different approaches: (i) a detailed design description for implementing the full Paxos logic in SDN switches, which identifies a sufficient set of required OpenFlow extensions; and (ii) an alternative, optimistic protocol which can be implemented without changes to the OpenFlow API, but relies on assumptions about how the network orders messages. Although neither of these protocols can be fully implemented without changes to the underlying switch firmware, we argue that such changes are feasible in existing hardware. Moreover, we present an evaluation that suggests that moving Paxos logic into the network would yield significant performance benefits for distributed applications.

P4Visor

“…Most work focus on applications of PDPs [11,16,32,36] or developing interfaces and primitives to enrich existing PDPs environment [7,34,47]. Our work falls in the latter class and argues for a principled extension of PDPs to include interfaces, abstractions, and primitives to enable testing -in short, to support rapid prototyping.…”

P4I/O: Intent-Based Networking with P4

“…Recent advances in data-plane programmability have enabled the implementation of customized high-speed network functions directly into programmable switches. Examples range from performing network telemetry on the switches [1], [2], to fast congestion detection on the data-plane [3], to offloading distributed consensus algorithms to the data-plane [4].…”