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Cheap silicon: a myth or reality? picking the right data plane hardware for software defined networking

Published:16 August 2013Publication History

ABSTRACT

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) promises the vision of more flexible and manageable networks, but requires certain level of programmability in the data plane. Current industry insight holds that programmable network processors are of lower performance than their hard-coded counterparts, such as Ethernet chips. This represents a roadblock to SDN adoption. In this paper we argue that contrast to the common view, the overhead of programmability is relatively low. We also argue that the apparent difference between programmable and hard-coded chips today is not primarily due to programmability itself, but because the internal balance of programmable network processors is tuned to more complex use cases. These arguments are backed with calculations and real-life measurements.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      HotSDN '13: Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking
      August 2013
      182 pages
      ISBN:9781450321785
      DOI:10.1145/2491185

      Copyright © 2013 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 16 August 2013

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      Acceptance Rates

      HotSDN '13 Paper Acceptance Rate38of84submissions,45%Overall Acceptance Rate88of198submissions,44%

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