A Performance Evaluation for Software Defined Networks with P4

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) have been attracting attention from both industry and academia as a means of achieving programmability in the network at different layers. The two emerging technologies have in the main, been researched individually in the literature, however, research evaluating the performance of SDN with P4 is limited. As the number of connected users grows and communication continues to evolve, increasing complexity and issues in heterogeneity relating to applications, increase the challenge for service providers to provide resilient connections with faster processing of packets increases. The application of SDN, with its ease of management through centralised programmable control logic, attracts attention from both academia and industry as a means of improving performance. This research has been conducted to explore the hypothesis that combining programmability at both the control plane and data plane, namely SDN+P4, will provide a platform with faster packet processing. In this research, we design a system platform to investigate the network and applications performance in SDN+P4, in comparison to SDN+Open vSwitch. Topologies considered were the multi-path, grid and transit-stub network models with hosts placed at leaf nodes to emulate a small, an intermediate, and a core network. The mininet emulation results demonstrate that across all case studies, parallel processing of P4 has provided more queues for traffic to be processed with the utilisation of a flexible parser. With the evolution of the internet and the heterogeneity of applications, SDN+P4 will, we believe, provide a more resilient and stringent service to all use cases of 5G and beyond.