P4 to SDNet: Automatic generation of an efficient protocol-independent packet parser on reconfigurable hardware

Abstract

Nowadays network managers look for ways to change the design and management of networks that can make decisions on the control plane. Future switches should be able to support the new features and flexibility required for parsing and processing packets. One of the critical components of switches is the packet parser that processes the headers of the packets to be able to decide on the incoming packets. Here the data plane, and particularly packet parser in OpenFlow switches, which should have the flexibility and programmability to support the new requirements and OpenFlow multiple versions, are focused. Designed here is an architecture that unlike the static network equipments, it has the flexibility and programmability in the data plane network, especially the SDN network, and supports the parsing and processing of specific packets. To describe this architecture, a high-level P4 language is used to implement it on a reconfigurable hardware (i.e., FPGA). After automatic generating the protocol-independent Packet parser architecture on the Virtex-7, it is compiled to firmware by Xilinx SDNet, and ultimately an FPGA Platform is implemented. It has fewer consumption resources and it is more efficient in terms of throughput and processing speed in comparison with other architectures. © 2018 IEEE.