A Unified Programming Model over Heterogeneous Data Planes

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) separates the data plane and the control plane in the traditional network, and the data plane communicates with the control plane through standard protocols. With the development of SDN, there are many southbound communication protocols in academia, such as OpenFlow, Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF), Programming protocol-independent packet processors (P4). The design ideas and implementation of these protocols are very different. Therefore, many controllers provide some high-level Application Programming Interfaces (API) supporting different protocols to shield the complexity of the protocol and facilitate the writing of network strategies, but none of them can support different southbound protocols at the runtime. That is, the controller can’t support a variety of different protocols while the data plane has kinds of switches. For example, Open Network Operating System (ONOS) supports P4 and OpenFlow, but it can only support a specific data plane at the runtime, so it cannot combine the strengths and advantages of different types of programmable switches. This paper proposes a unified programming model that can support both the P4 and POF protocols at the runtime so that network users can combine the high performance of the P4 and the flexibility of the POF. We also provide kinds of API to facilitate the writing of network strategies. In certain application scenarios, the losing of data packets caused by updating the data plane pipeline can be effectively eliminated with the programming model.