NDN.p4: Programming information-centric data-planes

Salvatore Signorello, Radu State, Jérôme François, Olivier Festor

Abstract: Although content-awareness at the network level is becoming more and more needed, Information-Centric Networking (ICN)-based solutions struggle to emerge. Research on ICN has already produced insightful outputs, nevertheless architecture-tied designs of ICN devices cannot be easily deployed and tested in operational networks; further those designs are hard to share. In the meantime, the vision of Software-Defined Networking has grown and taken new shapes. Network players desire to change devices' behavior often and drastically, even though performances are still crucial to operate at line-speed. This has been leading to a rethink of network devices designs with the aim to offer full-programmability through high-level programming languages for packet processors, like P4. The paper presents a preliminary open source implementation of the Named-Data Networking (NDN), that is, an ICN instance, written in P4.