FlowBlaze.p4: a library for quick prototyping of stateful SDN applications in P4

Abstract

Advances in data plane programmability enable the offloading and acceleration of complex network functions. FlowBlaze architecture for data planes has shown that Extended Finite State Machines can be efficiently supported in hardware enabling stateful packet processing at line-rate through a powerful abstraction for application programming. A recent proposal tries to simplify the development of FlowBlaze applications on top of its hardware and software prototypes with a domain-specific language, however, the community is currently missing a fast prototyping environment to experiment with EFSM-based applications using the P4 language, recognized as the de-facto standard for data plane programmability. This paper presents FlowBlaze.p4, a library developed in P4 that implements a FlowBlaze executor. The library maps the FlowBlaze elements into P4-native components and can be integrated into existing P4 programs. FlowBlaze.p4 can be easily configured by means of five configuration parameters. A GUI is also provided to enable the developer to simply draw the EFSM, skipping its manual mapping to the corresponding low-level run-time configuration. We present a functional evaluation of our library with two use cases that demonstrate how easily and quickly FlowBlaze.p4 and the GUI can be used to develop new stateful data plane applications.