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Unified POF Programming for Diversified SDN Data Plane Devices

Authors:
Haoyu Song
Jun Gong
Hongfei Chen
Justin Dustzadeh

Keywords: SDN; OpenFlow; POF; data plane; programming.

Abstract:
Software Defined Networking (SDN) will ultimately evolve to be able to program the network devices with customized forwarding applications. The ability to uniformly program heterogeneous forwarding elements built with different chips is desirable. In this paper, we discuss a data plane programming framework suitable for a flexible and protocol-oblivious data plane and show how OpenFlow can evolve to provide a generic interface for platform-independent programming and platform-specific compiling. We also show how an abstract instruction set can play a pivotal role to support different programming styles which map to different forwarding chip architectures. As an example, we compare the compiler-mode and interpreter-mode implementations for a Network Processing Unit (NPU) based forwarding element and conclude that the compiler-mode implementation can achieve a performance similar to that of a conventional non-SDN implementation. Built upon our Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) vision, this work presents our continuous efforts to complete the ecosystem and pave the SDN evolving path. The programming framework could be considered as a proposal for the OpenFlow 2.0 standard.

Pages: 92 to 97

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: May 24, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4006

ISBN: 978-1-61208-404-6

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from May 24, 2015 to May 29, 2015