Building Scalable and Flexible Virtual Networks on Programmable Data Plane

Abstract

Network virtualization allows multiple logical networks to coexist on the same physical infrastructure. However, existing virtualization techniques do not work well for data plane. Software-based virtualization techniques suffer from poor performance due to high virtualization overhead while hardware-based virtualization techniques are not flexible due to limited programmability. In this paper, we present Virtualizing Programmable Data Plane (VirtPDP), an architecture to achieve scalability, flexibility, and isolation simultaneously. Specifically, VirtPDP proposes a parallel pipeline structure by extending programmable data plane to parallelly execute multiple virtual networks on a programmable switch. With VirtPDP, each virtual network runs independently to guarantee performance isolation. Additionally, VirtPDP uses a multi-controller control plane structure to independently manage virtual networks on the programmable switch. We implement the VirtPDP prototype both on BMv2 target and Tofino target. The experimental results show that compared to existing work, VirtPDP not only realizes parallel operation of multiple virtual networks with low performance loss, but also provides better flexibility and scalability. Meanwhile, Tofino-based VirtPDP performs much better than DPDK-based NativeP4 while realizing the coexistence of multiple virtual networks.