P4-based implementation and evaluation of adaptive early packet discarding scheme

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has attracted widespread attention due to its architectural challenges to flexibly and dynamically control network switches and packets traversing them. Recently the programmability on the data plane becomes an active area of research. For example, Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) was introduced as a language to enable packet-level processing by the data plane and supported by not only on software but on a variety of hardware of switches and devices. Motivated by this shift, we provide a P4-based implementation of the MTQ/QTL that is a dynamic advanced Active Queue Management (AQM) scheme previously proposed by the authors. In this paper, we report a P4-based MTQ/QTL implementation and its evaluation on software switches by Mininet emulator. Through the emulation, we verify that the effects of MTQ/QTL to benefit delay-sensitive application flows are similar to the previous simulation results, which suggests that the data plane programming using P4 in advanced AQM is feasible and promising as a next generation SDN enabler.