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Forwarding metamorphosis: fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for SDN

Authors:

George Varghese,

Fernando Mujica,

Mark HorowitzAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

Pages 99 - 110

https://doi.org/10.1145/2486001.2486011

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In Software Defined Networking (SDN) the control plane is physically separate from the forwarding plane. Control software programs the forwarding plane (e.g., switches and routers) using an open interface, such as OpenFlow. This paper aims to overcomes two limitations in current switching chips and the OpenFlow protocol: i) current hardware switches are quite rigid, allowing ``Match-Action'' processing on only a fixed set of fields, and ii) the OpenFlow specification only defines a limited repertoire of packet processing actions. We propose the RMT (reconfigurable match tables) model, a new RISC-inspired pipelined architecture for switching chips, and we identify the essential minimal set of action primitives to specify how headers are processed in hardware. RMT allows the forwarding plane to be changed in the field without modifying hardware. As in OpenFlow, the programmer can specify multiple match tables of arbitrary width and depth, subject only to an overall resource limit, with each table configurable for matching on arbitrary fields. However, RMT allows the programmer to modify all header fields much more comprehensively than in OpenFlow. Our paper describes the design of a 64 port by 10 Gb/s switch chip implementing the RMT model. Our concrete design demonstrates, contrary to concerns within the community, that flexible OpenFlow hardware switch implementations are feasible at almost no additional cost or power.

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Index Terms

Forwarding metamorphosis: fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for SDN
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

August 2013

580 pages

ISBN:9781450320566

DOI:10.1145/2486001

General Chairs:
Dah Ming Chiu
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
,
Jia Wang
AT&T Labs - Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Paul Barford
University of Wisconsin, USA
,
Srinivasan Seshan
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 43, Issue 4
October 2013
595 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/2534169
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 27 August 2013

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SIGCOMM'13

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SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference

August 12 - 16, 2013

Hong Kong, China

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SIGCOMM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 246 submissions, 15%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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Cui ZHu YTian LYi PHou SChen H(2025)Altair: Resource-efficient optimization and deployment for data plane programsComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110917257(110917)Online publication date: Feb-2025
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Yoo SChen XRexford JBalzarotti DXu W(2024)SMARTCOOKIEProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3698913(217-234)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
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Ma JIyer RKashani SEmami MBourgeat TCandea GGavrilovska ATerry D(2024)Performance interfaces for hardware acceleratorsProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691938.3691984(855-874)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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