Challenging the Stateless Quo of Programmable Switches
Name
stateful_switch_hotnets_2020.pdf
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Accepted version
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573.57 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
19e5d1581a052c0ea643dc86125b59a7
Author(s)
Gebara, Nadeen
Lerner, Alberto
Yang, Mingran
Yu, Minlan
Costa, Paolo
Ghobadi, Manya
Date Issued
2020
Journal
HotNets 2020 - Proceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Gebara, Nadeen, Lerner, Alberto, Yang, Mingran, Yu, Minlan, Costa, Paolo et al. 2020. "Challenging the Stateless Quo of Programmable Switches." HotNets 2020 - Proceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020 ACM. Programmable switches based on the Protocol Independent Switch Architecture (PISA) have greatly enhanced the flexibility of today's networks by allowing new packet protocols to be deployed without any hardware changes. They have also been instrumental in enabling a new computing paradigm in which parts of an application's logic run within the network core (in-network computing). The characteristics and requirements of in/-network applications, however, are quite different from those of packet protocols for which programmable switches were originally designed. Packet protocols are typically stateless, while in-network applications require frequent operations on shared state maintained in the switch. This mismatch increases the developing complexity of in-network computing and hampers widespread adoption. In this paper, we describe the key obstacles to developing in-network applications on PISA and propose rethinking the current switch architecture. Rather than changing the existing architecture, we propose augmenting it with a Stateful Data Plane (SDP). The SDP supports the requirements of stateful applications, while the conventional data plane (CDP) performs packet-protocol functions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3422604.3425928
