Performance Analysis of General P4 Forwarding Devices with Controller Feedback

Nicolai Kröger, Fidan Mehmeti, Hasanin Harkous, Wolfgang Kellerer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) lays the foundation for the operation of future networking applications. The separation of the control plane from the programmable data plane increases the flexibility in network operation. One of the most used languages for describing the packet behavior in the data plane is P4. It allows protocol and hardware independent programming. With the expanding deployment of P4 programmable devices, it is of utmost importance to understand their performance behavior and limitations in order to design a network and provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. One of the most important performance metrics is the packet mean sojourn time in a P4 device. While previous works already modeled the sojourn time in P4 devices with controller feedback, those models were rather simplified and could not capture the system behavior for general cases, resulting in a potential highly inaccurate performance prediction. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we consider the system behavior of P4 devices for the general case, i.e., under general assumptions. To that end, we model the behavior with a queueing network with feedback. As it is impossible to provide closed-form solutions, we consider different approximations for the mean sojourn time. We validate our results against extensive realistic simulations, capturing different behaviors in the data and control planes. Results show that the most accurate approximation in almost all cases is the one in which the queues are decoupled and considered as independent despite the fact that there are dependencies. The level of discrepancy in the worst case does not exceed 18.2% for service times distributions with a coefficient of variation not greater than 1.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMSWiM 2022 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages55-64
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450394796
DOIs
StatePublished - 24 Oct 2022
Event25th ACM International Conference on Modelling, Analysis, and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, MSWiM 2022 - Virtual, Online, Canada
Duration: 24 Oct 202228 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameMSWiM 2022 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems

Conference

Conference25th ACM International Conference on Modelling, Analysis, and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, MSWiM 2022
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVirtual, Online
Period24/10/2228/10/22

Keywords

  • P4
  • SDN
  • queueing networks with feedback

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