MACSAD: High performance dataplane applications on the move

Abstract

Deep programmability of dataplane pipelines is one of the tenets of the evolving Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. Despite recent efforts on high performance programmable devices, achieving fully programmability (protocol independent) of heterogeneous dataplane implementations still pose numerous challenges. The P4 language is emerging as a strong candidate top-down approach to describe a protocol independent datapath pipeline, agnostic to network platforms. Meanwhile, the OpenDataPlane (ODP) project follows an open-source, bottom-up approach seeking multi-architecture APIs to write platform independent dataplane applications. In this paper, we present Multi-Architecture Compiler System for Abstract Dataplanes (MACSAD) as an approach to converge P4 and ODP through a common compilation process delivering portability of dataplane applications without compromising target performance improvements. We validate our prototype implementation through experimental evaluation of L2 and L3 dataplane applications on different target platforms (×86, ×86+DPDK, ARM-SoC).