Virtualization of programmable forwarding planes with p4vbox

Abstract

— Networking virtualization has enabled faster ser-vice provisioning and serves as a main driver of innovation, from software-defined networking to network functions virtu-alization and local area networks. Recent investigations have been assessing the feasibility of virtualization in programmable data planes. Despite the progress achieved, much work re-mains to assess their effectiveness for programmable virtual switches. In prior work, we introduced P4VBox, an architecture for the virtualization of programmable switches written using the P4 language. P4VBox provides parallel execution of multiple P4-based switch instances with the hot-swapping ability through full and partial reconfiguration methods. In this work, we build upon P4VBox and provide novel insights, substantiated by an experimental evaluation on a real-world testbed, addressing the power of switch virtualization. We measure resource utilization and performance to observe the behavior of P4VBox when handling large flows. Results show that P4VBox can achieve around 25 times higher throughputs than related works that provide virtualization at the cost of around 1.1% more resources and 20% less throughput than the P4-NetFPGA canonical reference design.