WP4: A P4 Programmable IEEE 802.11 Data Plane

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 wireless networking is now one of the most common methods of connectivity, and with it, a new range of security and reliability issues. While a Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach has made significant inroads with these problems in wired networks, the impact has not been as notable in the wireless networking space. One reason for this is that the existing SDN approach, predominately OpenFlow, is restricted to the network interface level as their match-action pipelines are only capable of processing Ethernet frames and cannot, therefore, address the underlying wireless elements. The introduction of the P4 programming language allows developers to create custom data planes which can include definable packet parsers. This functionality enables the construction of data planes capable of parsing IEEE 802.11 wireless frames. In this paper, we develop a new P4 compiler extension called WP4 to enable the creation of a P4 data plane accessible by a Linux wireless driver. It allows the processing of previously inaccessible management frames such as beacons, probes and de-authentication. Finally, we provide example scenarios for this novel approach and a performance evaluation of the WP4 implementation.