Resolving the Loop in High-Level SDN Program for Multi-table Pipeline Compilation

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is one of the key technologies to support smart computing and communication in the network domain. Though recent developments in high-level SDN programming have improved programming flexibility, loops (e.g., while) in an SDN program cannot yet be deployed in a datapath due to existing hardware constraints. In this paper, we conduct a novel study of loops in SDN programs for pipeline design, and propose the repeated software pipeline (RSP) transformation as a solution to compiling loops in a program. The proposed approach supports dynamic loop conditions and proves efficient at scale, even when the number of loops is very large. Evaluations found that the efficiency of RSP is 10x faster than the unrolling approach in some cases.