A Survey on Rerouting Techniques with P4 Programmable Data Plane Switches

Abstract

Traditionally, the networking industry has been dominated by closed and proprietary hardware and software. Vendors have been controlling the network by hard-coding how packets should be processed and providing the network operators with a set of predefined protocols. Recently, the industry, operators, and the research community have started to pay special attention to data plane programmability, which allows the user to define the packet processing behavior. Allowing the network operators and programmers to define, deploy, and test new forwarding behaviors in a relatively short time paved the way for a significant wave of innovation and experimentation. With the emergence of programmable data planes, traffic rerouting has been used by the research community. Rerouting approaches are deployed to mitigate various network issues. Despite the considerable number of works that deploy innovative rerouting mechanisms using programmable switches, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey. To this end, this paper provides an in-depth overview, detailed analysis, and unique categorization of the recent programmable data plane-based rerouting approaches. The survey explains the need for rerouting by highlighting the promising results while dealing with link/node failures, load imbalance, and congestion. It then discusses the challenges and considerations and presents future perspectives and open research issues.