A perspective on P4-based data and control plane modularity for network automation

When Software-Defined Networks (SDN) gained popularity, different control plane applications could run together to manage vendor-agnostic OpenFlow data planes. With the adoption of P4, developers realized that the P4 logic developed for one particular model and target could not be modularly shared, preventing fast adoption. As a result, a pipeline's specific functionality can not be exported and incorporated into another pipeline without the necessary manual adaptations. As a result, we present the early work for P4click, a Next-Generation SDN automation platform. It aims to modularly increment data plane pipeline features, combine P4 entities such as headers, the parser/deparser, build the pipeline execution flow, and the appropriate control plane applications. This paper presents the design adoptions to segregate independent P4 logic features and the architecture for data and control plane modularization.