Distributed Program Deployment for Resource-Aware Programmable Switches

Programmable switches allow data plane to program how packets are processed, which enables flexibility for network management tasks, e.g., packet scheduling and flow measurement. Existing studies focus on program deployment at a single switch, while deployment across the whole data plane is still a challenging issue, especially manifested in the difficulty in joint correct implementation of P4 programs, resource load balancing of network devices, and optimization of network performance. In this paper, we present RED, a Resource-Efficient and Distributed program deployment solution for programmable switches. First of all, we analyze data plane programs to estimate the resource utilization and divide them into two categories for further processing. Then, the proposed merging and splitting algorithms are selectively applied to merge or split the pending programs. Finally, we consolidate the scarce resources of the whole data plane for distributed program deployment. Extensive experiments with both testbed and large-scale simulations are conducted and comparison results show that 1) RED achieves network-wide resource balancing in a distributed way and the latency of processing packets within the switch was reduced by 16.7%. 2) RED improves the speedup by two orders of magnitude compared to P4Visor in merging program and merges more 18% tables than SPEED; 3) RED allows overwhelmed P4 programs to be deployed on multiple switches normally when their required resources exceed the limit of a single switch. RED makes the overwhelmed programs to be deployed on switches and switch throughput increased by 10.7%.