Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

Balancing Act: Navigating Control and Data Plane Responsibilities for Fast Operation in Programmable Networks

  • Published:
Journal of Network and Systems Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Communication networks increasingly operate under high expectations of performance, reliability, and availability. Quickly troubleshooting problems that may arise in the infrastructure and its traffic is an essential aspect of network operation. In this article, we investigate the division of tasks between control and data plane devices in programmable networks. We introduce Stratic, a new paradigm for designing network operation applications capable of responding to network problems at data-plane timescales. In the Stratic paradigm, control plane servers strategize ahead of time on how to deal with different operation scenarios while the data plane devices are equipped with mechanisms to autonomously detect and coordinate the response to events as they happen. We present example applications that evidence the timeliness benefits of the Stratic paradigm. We also examine the generality of the proposed paradigm by discussing its design space for solutions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

Data Availability

No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

References

  1. Qiu, K., Zhao, J., Wang, X., Fu, X., Secci, S.: Efficient recovery path computation for fast reroute in large-scale software-defined networks. IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. 37(8), 1755–1768 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2019.2927098

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Wan, Y., Song, H., Che, H., Xu, Y., Wang, Y., Zhang, C., Wang, Z., Pan, T., Li, H., Jiang, H., Hu, C., Liu, B.: Fastup: Fast TCAM update for SDN switches in datacenter networks. In: IEEE 41st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), pp. 887–897 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS51616.2021.00089

  3. Marques, J.A., Levchenko, K., Gaspary, L.P.: Responding to network failures at data-plane speeds with network programmability. In: 2023 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS) (2023). To appear.

  4. Marques, J., Levchenko, K., Gaspary, L.: IntSight: Diagnosing slo violations with in-band network telemetry. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies. CoNEXT ’20, pp. 421–434. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3386367.3431306

  5. Bosshart, P., Daly, D., Gibb, G., Izzard, M., McKeown, N., Rexford, J., Schlesinger, C., Talayco, D., Vahdat, A., Varghese, G., Walker, D.: P4: programming protocol-independent packet processors. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 44(3), 87–95 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1145/2656877.2656890

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Knight, S., Nguyen, H.X., Falkner, N., Bowden, R., Roughan, M.: The Internet topology zoo. IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. 29(9), 1765–1775 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2011.111002

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Ilha, Ad.S., Lapolli, Â.C., Marques, J.A., Gaspary, L.P.: Euclid: a fully in-network, P4-based approach for real-time DDoS attack detection and mitigation. IEEE Trans. Netw. Service Manage. 18(3), 3121–3139 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2020.3048265

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Röllin, L., Jacob, R., Vanbever, L.: A sleep study for isp networks: Evaluating link sleeping on real world data. In: 3rd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems Design and Implementation (HotCarbon 2024) (2024)

  9. Sapio, A., Abdelaziz, I., Aldilaijan, A., Canini, M., Kalnis, P.: In-network computation is a dumb idea whose time has come. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks. HotNets-XVI, pp. 150–156. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3152434.3152461

  10. Mazloum, A., Kfoury, E., Gomez, J., Crichigno, J.: A survey on rerouting techniques with p4 programmable data plane switches. Comput. Netw. 230, 109795 (2023)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Molero, E.C., Vissicchio, S., Vanbever, L.: Hardware-accelerated network control planes. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, pp. 120–126 (2018)

  12. Chiesa, M., Sedar, R., Antichi, G., Borokhovich, M., Kamisiński, A., Nikolaidis, G., Schmid, S.: PURR: A primitive for reconfigurable fast reroute: hope for the best and program for the worst. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments And Technologies. CoNEXT ’19, pp. 1–14. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3359989.3365410

  13. Hsu, K.-F., Beckett, R., Chen, A., Rexford, J., Walker, D.: Contra: a programmable system for performance-aware routing. In: 17th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 20), pp. 701–721. USENIX Association, Santa Clara (2020). https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi20/presentation/hsu

  14. Tajbakhsh, H., Parizotto, R., Schaeffer-Filho, A., Haque, I.: P4hauler: an accelerator-aware in-network load balancer for applications performance boosting. IEEE Trans. Cloud Comput. (2024)

  15. Jin, X., Li, X., Zhang, H., Soulé, R., Lee, J., Foster, N., Kim, C., Stoica, I.: Netcache: Balancing key-value stores with fast in-network caching. In: Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 121–136 (2017)

  16. Yu, Z., Zhang, Y., Braverman, V., Chowdhury, M., Jin, X.: Netlock: Fast, centralized lock management using programmable switches. In: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, pp. 126–138 (2020)

  17. Lao, C., Le, Y., Mahajan, K., Chen, Y., Wu, W., Akella, A., Swift, M.: {ATP}: In-network aggregation for multi-tenant learning. In: 18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 21), pp. 741–761 (2021)

  18. Yu, L., Sonchack, J., Liu, V.: Mantis: reactive programmable switches. In: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, pp. 296–309 (2020)

  19. Bosshart, P., Gibb, G., Kim, H.-S., Varghese, G., McKeown, N., Izzard, M., Mujica, F., Horowitz, M.: Forwarding metamorphosis: Fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for SDN. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference on SIGCOMM. SIGCOMM ’13, pp. 99–110. ACM, New York (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2486001.2486011

  20. Parizotto, R., Castanheira, L., Bonetti, F., Santos, A., Schaeffer-Filho, A.: Prime: Programming in-network modular extensions. In: NOMS 2020-2020 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium, pp. 1–9 (2020). IEEE

  21. Chen, X., Zhang, D., Wang, X., Zhu, K., Zhou, H.: P4sc: Towards high-performance service function chain implementation on the p4-capable device. In: 2019 IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Network and Service Management (IM), pp. 1–9 (2019). IEEE

  22. Wu, D., Chen, A., Ng, T.E., Wang, G., Wang, H.: Accelerated service chaining on a single switch asic. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, pp. 141–149 (2019)

  23. Gao, J., Cao, J., Li, Y., Liu, M., Tang, M., Cai, D., Zhai, E.: Sirius: Composing network function chains into {P4-Capable} edge gateways. In: 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 24), pp. 477–490 (2024)

Download references

Funding

This work was supported in part by CNPq (Brazil), NSF (USA, CNS-1740911), RNP (Brazil), CAPES (Brazil, Finance Code 1), and FAPESP (Brazil, 2020/05183-0 and 15/24494-8).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Chicago, Chicago , USA

    Jonatas A. Marques

  2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA

    Kirill Levchenko

  3. Santa Catarina State University, Florianópolis, Brazil

    Rafael R. Obelheiro

  4. Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Ricardo Parizotto & Luciano Paschoal Gaspary

Authors
  1. Jonatas A. Marques
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kirill Levchenko
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Rafael R. Obelheiro
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  4. Ricardo Parizotto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  5. Luciano Paschoal Gaspary
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

Jonatas wrote the main manuscript text. All authors reviewed the manuscript. Luciano coordinated the research.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ricardo Parizotto.

Ethics declarations

Competing interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Marques, J.A., Levchenko, K., Obelheiro, R.R. et al. Balancing Act: Navigating Control and Data Plane Responsibilities for Fast Operation in Programmable Networks. J Netw Syst Manage 33, 38 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-025-09915-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-025-09915-2

Keywords