PNA topic for March 27 - Reprogrammable data plane

[Alan Lo]

At the PNA meeting on March 27^th, Jiarong Xing from Rice University will give a short presentation on the work they are doing in Prof. Ang Chen’s group on reprogrammable data planes.  Here’s a short summary:

 

 

The emergence of programmable devices (switches, DPUs) enables flexible network function customization. Using P4, we can program the network to add, remove, and modify functions. However, in today’s programmable networks, there is still a barrier preventing us from deploy new changes in an easy and efficient way. The fundamental reason is that today’s network devices are only programmable at compile-time. Reprogramming them incurs intrusive service interruption or requires complicated traffic draining/undraining. In this talk, we propose to make future network devices runtime programmable. New network functions can be deployed at runtime quickly with zero downtime. we will present the new use cases enabled by runtime programmability, and discuss the technical roadmap to achieve the goal.