P4-Protect: 1+1 Path Protection for P4

Abstract

1+1 protection is a method to secure traffic between two nodes against failures in between. The sending node duplicates the traffic and forwards it over two disjoint paths. The receiving node assures that only a single copy of the traffic is further forwarded to its destination. In contrast to other protection schemes, this method prevents almost any packet loss in case of failures. 1+1 protection is usually applied on the optical layer, on Ethernet, or on MPLS. In this work we propose the application of 1+1 for P4-based IP networks. We define an 1+1 protection header for that purpose. We describe the behavior of sending and receiving nodes and provide a P4-based implementation for the Behavioral Model version 2 (bmv2) software switch and the hardware switch Tofino Edgecore Wedge 100BF-32X. We illustrate how to secure traffic, e.g. individual TCP flows, on the Internet with this approach. Finally, we present performance results showing that the P4-based implementation efficiently works on the Tofino Edgecore Wedge 100BF-32X.