VirtP4: An Architecture for P4 Virtualization

This paper presents VirtP4, an architecture for the virtualization of P4-based programmable forwarding planes. VirtP4 provides parallel execution of true independent virtual switch instances with assistance of traffic control and packet routing. The architecture is implemented in a NetFPGA-SUME board running two virtual switches, a L2 Switch and a Router. The area occupation data show the possibility of implementing up to 13 P4 instances in parallel. When compared to related works, performance results exhibit improvements up to 3 orders of magnitude for bandwidth and 2 orders of magnitude for latency.