HyPer4: Using P4 to Virtualize the Programmable Data Plane
Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) 2016.
areas
Networking,
Virtualization
abstract
Through virtualization, single physical data planes can logically support multiple networking contexts. We propose HyPer4 as a portable virtualization solution. HyPer4 provides a general purpose program, written in the P4 dataplane programming language, that may be dynamically configured to adopt behavior that is functionally equivalent to other P4 programs. HyPer4 extends, through software, the following features to diverse P4-capable devices: the ability to logically store multiple programs and either run them in parallel (network slicing) or as hot-swappable snapshots; and virtual networking between programs (supporting program composition or multi-tenant service interaction). HyPer4 permits modifying the set of programs, as well as the virtual network connecting them, at runtime, without disrupting currently active programs. We show that realistic ASICs-based hardware would be capable of running HyPer4 today.