P4MT: Designing and Evaluating Multi-Tenant Services for P4 Switches

The goal of P4MT is to leverage the role-based control mechanism in P4Runtime Specification to further enable multi-tenancy on a single P4 switch. The evaluation results show that P4MT consumes only a small percentage of ASIC space and causes a negligible increment in data plane/control plane latency. International P4 Experimental Networks (i-P4EN) has been created to realize the potential of P4 experimental networks. To perform multiple experiments for research groups, multitenancy is required to increase the efficiency of the testbed. By modifying the P4Runtime design and P4 pipeline, we designed and implemented multi-tenancy on a P4 switch. With P4MT, each tenant can select its own P4 pipeline and control the packet processing without intervening with the packet processing of other tenants. Future work includes supporting P4 Externs for programmable data plane networking, multi-tenant networking and automatic pipeline migration on P4MT.