Abstract
Traditionally, the data plane has been designed with fixed functions to forward packets using a small set of protocols. This closed-design paradigm has limited the capability of the switches to proprietary implementations which are hard-coded by vendors, inducing a lengthy, costly, and inflexible process. Recently, data plane programmability has attracted significant attention from both the research community and the industry, permitting operators and programmers in general to run customized packet processing functions. This open-design paradigm is paving the way for an unprecedented wave of innovation and experimentation by reducing the time of designing, testing, and adopting new protocols; enabling a customized, top-down approach to develop network applications; providing granular visibility of packet events defined by the programmer; reducing complexity and enhancing resource utilization of the programmable switches; and drastically improving the performance of applications that are offloaded to the data plane. Despite the impressive advantages of programmable data plane switches and their importance in modern networks, the literature has been missing a comprehensive survey. To this end, this paper provides a background encompassing an overview of the evolution of networks from legacy to programmable, describing the essentials of programmable switches, and summarizing their advantages over Software-defined Networking (SDN) and legacy devices. The paper then presents a unique, comprehensive taxonomy of applications developed with P4 language; surveying, classifying, and analyzing more than 200 articles; discussing challenges and considerations; and presenting future perspectives and open research issues.
Highlights
S INCE the emergence of the world wide web and the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s, the networking industry has been dominated by closed and proprietary hardware and software
When numerous devices continuously transmit Internet of Things (IoT) packets, a significant percentage of network bandwidth is wasted on transmitting these headers
Packet aggregation is a mechanism in which the payloads of small packets are aggregated into a single larger packet in order to mitigate the bandwidth overhead caused by transmitting multiple headers
Summary
S INCE the emergence of the world wide web and the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s, the networking industry has been dominated by closed and proprietary hardware and software. Since a large number of reports is typically produced in INT, having a high-performance collector is essential to avoid missing important network events. To this end, a number of research works focus on developing and enhancing the performance of INT collectors running on commodity servers. IntMon [63] is an ONOS-based collector application for INT reports It includes a web-based interface that allows controlling which flows to monitor and the specific metadata to collect. INTCollector [65] is a collector that extracts events, which are important network information, from INT raw data It uses in-kernel processing to further improve the performance.
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