POMP: Protocol Oblivious SDN Programming with Automatic Multi-Table Pipelining

摘要

SDN programming has been challenging because programmers have to not only implement the control logic, but also handle low-level details such as the generation of flow tables and the communication between the controller and switches. New generation of SDN with protocol oblivious forwarding and multi-table pipelining introduces even more low-level details to consider. We propose POMP, the first SDN programming environment supporting both protocol oblivious forwarding and automatic multi-table pipelining. POMP applies the static taint analysis technique to automatically infer compact and efficient multi-table pipelines from a data-plane agnostic network policy written by the programmer. The runtime system tracks the execution of the network policy, and automatically generates table entries. POMP also introduces a novel notion of dependent labels in the taint analysis, which, combined with the runtime information of the network policy, can further reduce the number of table entries. Like P4, POMP supports protocol-oblivious programming by providing a network protocol specification language. Parsers of packets can be automatically generated based on the protocol specification. POMP supports two main emerging SDN platforms, POF and P4, therefore network policies written in POMP are portable over any switches supporting POF or P4.