research-article

P4: programming protocol-independent packet processors

Authors:

Jennifer Rexford,

Cole Schlesinger,

George Varghese,

David WalkerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 44, Issue 3

Pages 87 - 95

https://doi.org/10.1145/2656877.2656890

Published: 28 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

P4 is a high-level language for programming protocol-independent packet processors. P4 works in conjunction with SDN control protocols like OpenFlow. In its current form, OpenFlow explicitly specifies protocol headers on which it operates. This set has grown from 12 to 41 fields in a few years, increasing the complexity of the specification while still not providing the flexibility to add new headers. In this paper we propose P4 as a strawman proposal for how OpenFlow should evolve in the future. We have three goals: (1) Reconfigurability in the field: Programmers should be able to change the way switches process packets once they are deployed. (2) Protocol independence: Switches should not be tied to any specific network protocols. (3) Target independence: Programmers should be able to describe packet-processing functionality independently of the specifics of the underlying hardware. As an example, we describe how to use P4 to configure a switch to add a new hierarchical label.

References

[1]

C. Kozanitis, J. Huber, S. Singh, and G. Varghese, Leaping multiple headers in a single bound: Wire-speed parsing using the Kangaroo system," in IEEE INFOCOM, pp. 830{838, 2010.

Digital Library

[2]

P. Bosshart, G. Gibb, H.-S. Kim, G. Varghese, N. McKeown, M. Izzard, F. Mujica, and M. Horowitz, Forwarding metamorphosis: Fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for SDN," in ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.

Digital Library

[3]

\Intel Ethernet Switch Silicon FM6000." http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/ethernet-switch-fm6000-sdn-paper.pdf.

[4]

N. Yadav and D. Cohn, \OpenFlow Primitive Set." http://goo.gl/6qwbg, July 2011.

[5]

H. Song, Protocol-oblivious forwarding: Unleash the power of SDN through a future-proof forwarding plane," in SIGCOMM HotSDN Workshop, Aug. 2013.

Digital Library

[6]

Openflow forwarding abstractions working group charter." http://goo.gl/TtLtw0, Apr. 2013.

[7]

M. Raju, A. Wundsam, and M. Yu, NOSIX: A lightweight portability layer for the SDN OS," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review, 2014.

Digital Library

[8]

V. Jeyakumar, M. Alizadeh, C. Kim, and D. Mazieres, Tiny packet programs for low-latency network control and monitoring," in ACM SIGCOMM HotNets Workshop, Nov. 2013.

Digital Library

[9]

A. Sivaraman, K. Winstein, S. Subramanian, and H. Balakrishnan, No silver bullet: Extending SDN to the data plane," in ACM SIGCOMM HotNets Workshop, Nov. 2013.

Digital Library

[10]

E. Kohler, R. Morris, B. Chen, J. Jannotti, and M. F. Kaashoek, The Click modular router," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 18, pp. 263--297, Aug. 2000.

Digital Library

[11]

Multiprotocol Label Switching Charter." http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mpls/charter/.

[12]

R. Niranjan Mysore, A. Pamboris, N. Farrington, N. Huang, P. Miri, S. Radhakrishnan, V. Subramanya, and A. Vahdat, PortLand: A scalable fault-tolerant layer 2 data center network fabric," in ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 39--50, Aug. 2009.

Digital Library

[13]

P. McCann and S. Chandra, PacketTypes: Abstract specificationa of network protocol messages," in ACMSIGCOMM, pp. 321--333, Aug. 2000.

Digital Library

[14]

G. Back, DataScript - A specification and scripting language for binary data," in Generative Programming and Component Engineering, vol. 2487, pp. 66--77, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002.

Digital Library

[15]

K. Fisher and R. Gruber, PADS: A domain specific language for processing ad hoc data," in ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pp. 295--304, June 2005.

Digital Library

[16]

G. Gibb, G. Varghese, M. Horowitz, and N. McKeown, Design principles for packet parsers," in ANCS, pp. 13--24, 2013.

Digital Library

[17]

\Open vSwitch website." http://www.openvswitch.org.

[18]

D. Zhou, B. Fan, H. Lim, M. Kaminsky, and D. G. Andersen, Scalable, high performance ethernet forwarding with CuckooSwitch," in CoNext, pp. 97--108, 2013.

Digital Library

[19]

\EZChip 240-Gigabit Network Processor for Carrier Ethernet Applications." http:http://www.ezchip.com/p_np5.htm.

[20]

\Broadcom BCM56850 Series." https://www.broadcom.com/products/Switching/ Data-Center/BCM56850-Series.

Cited By

He WYao HChang HLiu Y(2025)A P4-Based Approach to Traffic Isolation and Bandwidth Management for 5G Network SlicingTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2024.901002030:1(171-185)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2024.9010020
Xiao JChang CMa YYang CYuan L(2024)Secure multi-path routing for Internet of Things based on trust evaluationMathematical Biosciences and Engineering10.3934/mbe.202414821:2(3335-3363)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.3934/mbe.2024148
Song XLu RGuo Z(2024)High-Performance Reconfigurable Pipeline Implementation for FPGA-Based SmartNICMicromachines10.3390/mi1504044915:4(449)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/mi15040449
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

P4: programming protocol-independent packet processors
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols

Recommendations

The P4->NetFPGA Workflow for Line-Rate Packet Processing
FPGA '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

P4 has emerged as the de facto standard language for describing how network packets should be processed, and is becoming widely used by network owners, systems developers, researchers and in the classroom. The goal of the work presented here is to make ...
P4-To-VHDL

Automatic generation of parser and deparser blocks capable to process traffic at speed of 100Gbps.Protocol independent (can be used not only in computer networks).Easy implementation of the final application because both modules (parser and deparser) ...
P4-Compatible High-Level Synthesis of Low Latency 100 Gb/s Streaming Packet Parsers in FPGAs
FPGA '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Packet parsing is a key step in SDN-aware devices. Packet parsers in SDN networks need to be both reconfigurable and fast, to support the evolving network protocols and the increasing multi-gigabit data rates. The combination of packet processing ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 44, Issue 3

July 2014

127 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/2656877

Editors:
Konstantina Papagiannaki
Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain
,
Katerina Argyraki
EPFL, Switzerland
,
Hitesh Ballani
Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
,
Fabián Bustamante
Northwestern University, USA
,
Joseph Camp
SMU, USA
,
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University, USA
,
Phillipa Gill
Stony Brook University, USA
,
Marco Mellia
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
,
Bhaskaran Raman
IIT Bombay, India
,
Joel Sommers
Colgate University, USA
,
Renata Teixeira
LIP6, France
,
Sanjay Jha
University of New South Wales, Australia

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 Authors.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 July 2014

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 44, Issue 3

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2,111
Total Citations
View Citations
8,960
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1,143
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)212

Reflects downloads up to 06 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

He WYao HChang HLiu Y(2025)A P4-Based Approach to Traffic Isolation and Bandwidth Management for 5G Network SlicingTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2024.901002030:1(171-185)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2024.9010020
Xiao JChang CMa YYang CYuan L(2024)Secure multi-path routing for Internet of Things based on trust evaluationMathematical Biosciences and Engineering10.3934/mbe.202414821:2(3335-3363)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.3934/mbe.2024148
Song XLu RGuo Z(2024)High-Performance Reconfigurable Pipeline Implementation for FPGA-Based SmartNICMicromachines10.3390/mi1504044915:4(449)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/mi15040449
Żal MMichalski MZwierzykowski P(2024)Implementation of a Lossless Moving Target Defense MechanismElectronics10.3390/electronics1305091813:5(918)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13050918
Liu HNi HHan R(2024)A Link Status-Based Multipath Scheduling Scheme on Network NodesElectronics10.3390/electronics1303060813:3(608)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13030608
Song XGuo ZWang XSong M(2024)High-Throughput Exact Matching Implementation on FPGA with Shared Rule Tables Among Parallel PipelinesIEICE Transactions on Communications10.23919/transcom.2023EBP3140E107-B:5(387-397)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/transcom.2023EBP3140
Brandino BGrampin EDietz KWehner NSeufert MHoßfeld TCasas P(2024)HALIDS: a Hardware-Assisted Machine Learning IDS for in-Network Monitoring2024 8th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA)10.23919/TMA62044.2024.10559083(1-4)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/TMA62044.2024.10559083
Zou YPan TLu LLi ZYao KMu YWan YHuang TLiu Y(2024)HyperSFC: State-Intensive Service Function Chaining on Hyper-Converged Edge Infrastructure2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619908(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619908
De Coninck Q(2024)Core QUIC: Enabling Dynamic, Implementation-Agnostic Protocol Extensions2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619827(640-646)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619827
Boughzala BKoldehofe B(2024)In-Network Management of Parallel Data Streams over Programmable Data Planes2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619812(50-58)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619812
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents