research-article

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

Authors:

George Varghese,

Fernando Mujica,

Mark HorowitzAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 43, Issue 4

Pages 99 - 110

https://doi.org/10.1145/2534169.2486011

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

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

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

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

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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 August 2013

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 43, Issue 4

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Ran DChen XSong L(2024)ComPipe: A Novel Flow Placement and Measurement Algorithm for Programmable Composite PipelinesElectronics10.3390/electronics1306102213:6(1022)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13061022
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
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
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