Service Function Chaining Based on Segment Routing Using P4 and SR-IOV (P4-SFC)

Abstract

In this paper we describe P4-SFC to support service function chaining (SFC) based on a single P4-capable switch and off-the-shelf components. It utilizes MPLS-based segment routing for traffic forwarding in the network and SR-IOV for efficient packet handling on hosts. We describe the P4-SFC architecture and demonstrate its feasibility by a prototype using the Tofino Edgecore Wedge 100BF-32X as P4 switch. Performance test show that L2 throughput for VNFs on a host is significantly larger when connected via SR-IOV with the host’s network interface card instead of over a software switch.

Latency control in service chaining using P4-based data plane programmability

“…The works in [26] and in [27] illustrate two design methodologies for implementing multiple network functions and their programmable service chains inside a single P4 switch, resorting to FPGA and bare metal switch platforms, respectively, and showing constant latency performance. The work in [28] improves SFC performance by implementing P4 segment routing at the switches and SR-IOV virtualization at the hosts. A similar work in [29] considers the use of P4 to decompose the execution of pre-programmed VNFs in a network processor using a multi-level chaining scheme in order to optimize the resource allocation.…”