Research On The Crucial Applications Toward The Programmable Data Plane

Network measurement algorithms are the foundation of network applications and play a very important role in computer networks.In the context of big data and cloud computing,network traffic has increased dramatically.Traditional network measurement algorithms are based on CPU sampling in the control plane with low accuracy.The proposed software-defined network provides a new idea for network measurement algorithms.The programmable data plane provided by the softwaredefined network enables the packet processing function of the network hardware to be defined by software.The user can flexibly program in the data plane and combine the forwarding of network packets with the network measurement task.High throughput programmable data plane hardware enables forwarding and measurement each packet at line rate.However,the high throughput of the programmable data plane imposes many restrictions on the operations that the program can perform.The storage space and resources of the hardware device are limited.The difficulty in designing the measurement algorithm is that these restrictions must be observed.This paper first proposes an algorithm for accurately counting messages in a programmable data plane.It utilizes the working mechanism of the sliding window to adapt to the characteristics and limitations of the programmable data plane.Experiments show that the sliding window packet count enables accurate counting of packets.Due to the complexity of hardware algorithm implementation and verification,past work has been based on software simulation to test the accuracy of measurement algorithms.However,in the actual application scenario,due to the concurrent operation of the data plane and the control plane on the measurement data,the data may be inconsistent,which greatly reduces the measurement accuracy.In order to solve the problem of data inconsistency,this paper proposes a ping-pong buffering mechanism,and the data plane and control plane are improved for the characteristics of the ping-pong buffering mechanism.Ultimately we implement network-wide network measurement under the ping-pong buffering mechanism.The ping-pong buffering mechanism is implemented on the Tofino programmable switch.The results show that the double buffering mechanism effectively improves the measurement accuracy and reduces the communication overhead.