P4RCProbe for Evaluating the Performance ofP4Runtime-based Controllers
05 January 2022
In SDN networks, the control plane instructs the data plane to perform packet processing tasks. Understanding the performance of the controllers is therefore critical to assess the overall performance of the networks. Although OF-based controllers have been well investigated in this regard, controllers based on P4Runtime, which is the de-facto implementation for the southbound control of programmable data planes in P4, is still missing in the literature. In this work, we implement the first benchmarking tool for P4Runtime-based controllers, apply the tool to evaluate the performance of ONOS controller running in both OF and P4Runtime mode, and identify processing bottlenecks in the P4Runtime implementation. We accordingly propose a code patch for the implementation which shows 60 % improvement in the achieved packet rate.
