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P4’s data-plane programmability allows for highly customizable and programmable packet processing, enabling rapid innovation in network applications, such as virtualization, security, load balancing, and traffic engineering. Researchers extensively use Mininet, a popular network emulator, integrated with BMv2, for fast and flexible prototyping of these P4-based applications, but due to its lower performance in terms of throughput and latency compared to a production-grade software switch like Open vSwitch, it is crucial to have an accurate and scalable emulation testbed. In this paper, we develop a lightweight virtual time system and integrate it into Mininet with BMv2 to enhance fidelity and scalability. By scaling the time of interactions between containers and the underlying physical machine by a time dilation factor (TDF), we can trade time with system resources, making the emulated P4 network appear to be faster from the viewpoint of the switch/host processes in the container. Our experimental results show that the testbed can accurately emulate much larger networks with high loads, scaled by a factor of TDF with extremely low system overhead.
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Modular Switch Programming Under Resource Constraints
Programmable networks support a wide variety of applications, including access control, routing, monitoring, caching, and synchronization. As demand for applications grows, so does resource contention within the switch data plane. Cramming applications onto a switch is a challenging task that often results in non-modular programming, frustrating “trial and error” compile-debug cycles, and suboptimal use of resources. In this paper, we present P4All, an extension of P4 that allows programmers to define elastic data structures that stretch automatically to make optimal use of available switch resources. These data structures are defined using symbolic primitives (that parameterize the size and shape of the structure) and objective functions (that quantify the value gained or lost as that shape changes). A top-level optimization function specifies how to share resources amongst data structures or applications. We demonstrate the inherent modularity and effectiveness of our design by building a range of reusable elastic data structures including hash tables, Bloom filters, sketches, and key-value stores, and using those structures within larger applications. We show how to implement the P4All compiler using a combination of dependency analysis, loop unrolling, linear and non-linear constraint generation, and constraint solving. We evaluate the compiler’s performance, showing that a range of elastic programs can be compiled to P4 in few minutes at most, but usually less.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1837030
- PAR ID:
- 10359322
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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