Abstract
SummaryTelecommunication providers continuously evolve their network infrastructure by increasing performance, lowering time to market, providing new services, and reducing the cost of the infrastructure and its operation. Network function virtualization (NFV) on commodity hardware offers an attractive, low‐cost platform to establish innovations much faster than with purpose‐built hardware products. Unfortunately, implementing NFV on commodity processors does not match the performance requirements of the high‐throughput data plane components in large carrier access networks. Therefore, programmable hardware architectures like field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), network processors, and switch silicon supporting the flexibility of the P4 language offer a promising way to account for both performance requirements and the demand to quickly introduce innovations into networks. In this article, we propose a way to offer residential network access with programmable packet processing architectures. On the basis of the highly flexible P4 programming language, we present a design and open source implementation of a broadband network gateway (BNG) data plane that meets the challenging demands of BNGs in carrier‐grade environments. In addition, we introduce a concept of hybrid openBNG design, realizing the required hierarchical quality of service (HQoS) functionality in a subsequent FPGA. The proposed evaluation results show the desired performance characteristics, and our proposed design together with upcoming P4 hardware can offer a giant leap towards highest performance NFV network access.
Highlights
Internet service providers (ISPs) are challenged by competition, regulators, and content providers to deliver high-performance services to residential subscribers at ever lower costs
The tests are written in a target-independent way by introducing two abstraction layers: First, we propose a control plane abstraction layerfor a simple broadband network gateway (BNG) network function, based on the interface suggested in Section 6.4, which translates control plane commands into the underlying P4 state configuration commands
We have proposed a P4-based implementation of a BNG network function data plane, which complies with all essential requirements of a large operator of a telecommunications network
Summary
Internet service providers (ISPs) are challenged by competition, regulators, and content providers to deliver high-performance services to residential subscribers at ever lower costs. Our previous work investigated how commodity bare-metal switches could be adapted to provide the function of residential network access.[2] Commodity switch silicon in 2016 was sufficient to implement the essential properties of a small-scale BNG with a very high performance, but not with all features needed by a large-scale network operator, like Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE)encapsulation/decapsulation or the required scalability. The goal of this article, which is an extended version the previously published paper “P4-BNG: Central office network functions on programmable packet pipelines,”[4] is to present a P4-based design and implementation of a BNG data plane and a field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based queueing chip, which runs in a CORD environment and fulfills all requirements of a large-scale telecommunication provider. We discuss the implementation and present some evaluation results
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