Fast network congestion detection and avoidance using P4

Fast network congestion detection and avoidance using P4

Turkovic, B.
Kuipers, F.
van Adrichem, N.L.M.
Langendoen, K.

2018

Along with exciting visions for 5G communications and the Tactile Internet, the networking requirement of attaining extremely low end-to-end latency has appeared. While network devices are typically equipped with buffers to counteract packet loss caused by short-lived traffic bursts, the more those buffers get filled, the more delay is added to every packet passing through. In this paper, we develop congestion avoidance methods that harness the power of fully programmable data-planes. The corresponding programmable switches, through languages such as P4, can be programmed to gather and react to important packet meta-data, such as queue load, while the data packets are being processed. In particular, we enable P4 switches to (1) track processing and queuing delays of latency-critical flows and (2) react immediately in the data-plane to congestion by rerouting the affected flows. Through a proof-of-concept implementation in emulation and on real hardware, we demonstrate that a data-plane approach reduces average and maximum delay, as well as jitter, when compared to non-programmable approaches. © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

5G
Low latency
Programmable data-planes
Tactile internet
5G mobile communication systems
Congestion avoidance
Data planes
End to end latencies
Fully programmables
Low latency
Network congestions
Programmable switches
Short-lived traffic
Packet networks

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d8d151f7-807f-4051-b2d3-047ba05bbe77

843748

Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

9781450359078

NEAT 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Workshop on Networking for Emerging Applications and Technologies, Part of SIGCOMM 2018 : ACM SIGCOMM 2018 Workshop on Networking for Emerging Applications and Technologies, NEAT 2018, 20 August 2018, 45-51

Conference Paper ACM SIGCOMM

conference paper