Random Linear Network Coding on Programmable Switches

© 2019 IEEE. By extending the traditional store-and-forward mechanism, network coding has the capability to improve a network's throughput, robustness, and security. Given the fundamentally different packet processing required by this new paradigm and the inflexibility of hardware, existing sol...

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Bibliographic Details
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137687
Description
Summary:© 2019 IEEE. By extending the traditional store-and-forward mechanism, network coding has the capability to improve a network's throughput, robustness, and security. Given the fundamentally different packet processing required by this new paradigm and the inflexibility of hardware, existing solutions are based on software. As a result, they have limited performance and scalability, creating a barrier to its wide-spread adoption. By leveraging the recent advances in programmable networking hardware, in this paper we propose a random linear network coding data plane written in P4, as a first step towards a production-level platform. Our solution includes the ability to combine the payload of multiple packets and of executing the required Galois field operations, and shows promise to be practical even under the strict memory and processing constraints of switching hardware.