Lewis, Benjamin and Fawcett, Lyndon and Broadbent, Matthew and Race, Nicholas (2018) Using P4 to Enable Scalable Intents in Software Defined Networks. In: ICNP 2018 : 2018 IEEE 26th InternationalConference on Network Protocols. UNSPECIFIED, pp. 442-443. ISBN 9781538660447
Using_P4_to_Enable_Scalable_Intents_in_Software_Defined_Networks.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial.
Download (151kB)
Abstract
When designing Software Defined Networks (SDNs), there is a risk that the additional abstractions available can result in reduced scalability and performance. One such abstraction, intents, are a way in which network administrators can express policies rather than having to define specific forwarding rules. This provides a benefit to administrators in allowing automatic network reconfiguration and fault tolerance. In this paper, we highlight the performance overheads associated with the intents framework from a popular SDN controller, ONOS. We propose a novel prototype that leverages source-based routing and programmable data planes using P4 in order to reduce the overheads of intent-based forwarding.