Title
Control Flow Based Cost Analysis For P4
Abstract
The networking industry is currently undergoing a steady trend of softwarization. Yet, network engineers suffer from the lack of software development tools that support programming of new protocols. We are creating a cost analysis tool for the P4 programming language, that automatically verifies whether the developed program meets soft deadline requirements imposed by the network. In this paper, we present an approach to estimate the average execution time of P4 program based on control flow graphs. Our approach takes into consideration that many of the parts of P4 are implementation-defined: required information can be added in through incremental refinement, while missing information is handled by falling back to less precise defaults. We illustrate application of this approach to a P4 protocol in two case studies: we use it to examine the effect of a compiler optimization in the deparse stage, and to show how it enables cost modelling complex lookup table implementations. Finally, we assess future research tasks to be completed before the tool is ready for real-world usage.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1515/comp-2020-0131
OPEN COMPUTER SCIENCE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
data plane, control flow graph, static profiling, refinement, soft real-time
Journal
11
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2299-1093
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dániel Lukács100.34
Gergely Pongrácz26816.25
Máté Tejfel300.34