VirtP4: An Architecture for P4 Virtualization

Saquetti, Mateus; Bueno, Guilherme; Cordeiro, Weverton; Azambuja, Jose Rodrigo

doi:10.1109/ipdpsw.2019.00021

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Since this is never instantaneous, it can lead to some downtime, state loss, and service interruptions for all NFs deployed on the switch and all flows processed by it. Fortunately, various data-plane reconfiguration approaches facilitate uninterrupted reconfigurability of the data-plane [9], [23], [29], and should be used to enable dynamic NF placement. In this paper, for simplicity, the P4-program contains all the NFs, and we just update a register indicating if the NF is active or not.…”

Section: Overhead and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Elastic Slicing in Programmable Networks

Turkovic

Nijhuis

Kuipers

2021

2021 IEEE 7th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)

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The concept of network slicing enables operators to provision multiple virtual networks on top of a single (shared) physical infrastructure. Adding elasticity to slicing, i.e., the ability to on-demand provision/release dedicated network resources, improves resource utilization. However, efficiently allocating and scaling slice resources, while maintaining state consistency, is challenging. Especially with P4-programmable network devices that process packets at Tbps speeds, controller-driven scaling of network functions would be too time-consuming, and data-plane scaling is needed.In this paper, we address this need, by developing a custom scaling protocol and framework that can consistently, with negligible delay, scale network slices and functions transparently to the slice end-users. We compare, via emulation and experiments on programmable hardware, our approach to state-of-the-art scaling techniques and demonstrate significant slice resource utilization improvements and scaling duration reductions.

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Section: Overhead and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Elastic Slicing in Programmable Networks

Turkovic

Nijhuis

Kuipers

2021

2021 IEEE 7th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)

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“…These hypervisors may, however, impose severe performance overhead to programmable switch virtualization, considering the multiple match-action tables that these hypervisors require. Additionally, even though other prior solutions offer support to P4-based switch parallel execution [8,9], they lack in replacing virtual instances without affecting the data plane state.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtualization of Programmable Forwarding Planes with P4VBox

Rodrigues

Saquetti

Bueno

et al. 2021

JICS

Self Cite

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Networking virtualization has shown to enable faster service provioning and server as a main driver of innovation, from Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Local Area Networks (VLAN). Recent investigations began assessing the feasibility of virtualization in Programmable Data Planes (PDP). Despite the progress achieved, much work remains to assess their effectiveness for programmable virtual switches. In a prior work, we introduced P4VBox, an architecture for virtualization of programmable switches written using the P4 language. P4VBox provides the execution of multiple P4 based switch instances running in parallel, with the ability of hot-swapping through full and partial reconfiguration. In this work, we build upon P4VBox to provide novel insights, substantiated by experimental evaluation on a real-world testbed, on the evaluation of the real power of switch virtualization in a NetFPGASUME board, deploying three use cases. We measured resource utilization and performance to observe the behavior of P4VBox when handling large flows. Our results demonstrate that P4VBox incurs a small overhead compared with the canonical NetFPGA reference design. Yet, it increases orders of magnitude considering the existing works.

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Building and Testing Modular Programs for Programmable Data Planes

Zheng

Benson

2020

IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun.

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VirtP4: An Architecture for P4 Virtualization

Cited by 8 publications

References 4 publications

Elastic Slicing in Programmable Networks

Elastic Slicing in Programmable Networks

Virtualization of Programmable Forwarding Planes with P4VBox

Building and Testing Modular Programs for Programmable Data Planes

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