4.25
NetFPGA: Rapid Prototyping of Networking Devices in Open Source
The demand-led growth of datacenter networks has meant that many constituent technologies are beyond the budget of the wider community.
In order to make and validate timely and relevant new contributions, the wider community requires accessible evaluation, experimentation and demonstration environments with specification comparable to the subsystems of the most massive datacenter networks.
We demonstrate NetFPGA, an open-source platform for rapid prototyping of networking devices with I/O capabilities up to 100Gbps. NetFPGA offers an integrated environment that enables networking research by users from a wide range of disciplines: from hardware-centric research to formal methods.
4.27
Millions of little minions: using packets for low latency network programming and visibility
This paper presents a practical approach to rapidly introducing new dataplane functionality into networks: End-hosts embed tiny programs into packets to actively query and manipulate a network's internal state.
We show how this "tiny packet program" (TPP) interface gives end-hosts unprecedented visibility into network behavior, enabling them to work with the network to achieve a desired functionality.
**Our design leverages what each component does best: **(a) switches forward and execute tiny packet programs (at most 5~instructions) in-band at line rate, and (b) end-hosts perform arbitrary (and easily updated) computation on network state.
4.29
RAUflow: building Virtual Private Networks with MPLS and OpenFlow
Control and Data Plane separation is a well established networking paradigm, fuelled by the raising of Software Defined Networking (SDN), which foresee the implementation of complex, valuable network behaviour over commodity hardware.
A Survey on the Security of Stateful SDN Data Planes
P4 language specification [25] indeed goes in this direction by providing the programmer with an array of registries which can store states that persist across multiple packets of a flow.
At this stage, the layman reader might perhaps see the distribution of states inside network switches as a step backward with respect to the SDN principles.
Rather, the take-home message of this paper is that ...