TY - GEN
T1 - Performance Analysis of General P4 Forwarding Devices with Controller Feedback
AU - Kröger, Nicolai
AU - Mehmeti, Fidan
AU - Harkous, Hasanin
AU - Kellerer, Wolfgang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/10/24
Y1 - 2022/10/24
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - P4
KW - SDN
KW - queueing networks with feedback
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85141684327&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3551659.3559045
DO - 10.1145/3551659.3559045
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85141684327
T3 - MSWiM 2022 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems
SP - 55
EP - 64
BT - MSWiM 2022 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 25th ACM International Conference on Modelling, Analysis, and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, MSWiM 2022
Y2 - 24 October 2022 through 28 October 2022
ER -