Creating Digital Twin Distributed Networks Using Switches With Programmable Data Plane

Sammanfattning: The domain specific language P4 is a novel initiative which extends the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm by allowing for data plane programmability. Network virtualisation is a class of network technologies which can be used to abstract the addressing in a network, allowing multiple tenants to utilise the network resources while being agnostic to the underlying network and the other tenants. In other words, twins of tenants using the same addresses can co-exist on the same underlying network. If a twin is a distributed network, it may even be spread out across multiple sites which are connected to a common backbone. In this study, network virtualisation using P4 is evaluated with emphasis on scalability in terms of number of twins and sites. A set of potential network virtualisation technologies are identified and categorised. Based on this categorisation, two variations of network virtualisation are implemented on the P4 capable software switch BMv2 and the performance of both variations are evaluated against the non-P4 solution Linux bridge. Linux bridge was found to yield 451 times more useful bandwidth than the best performing P4 implementation on BMv2, while also learning MAC addresses faster and generating less traffic on the backbone. It is concluded that the performance of network virtualisation implemented and running on BMv2 is worse compared to the non-P4 solution Linux bridge.