Open Networking Summit North America 2018

Today operators can buy high-performance switches that are entirely programmable and use languages like P4 to program their behavior. This offers excellent opportunities for NFV architectures, as it can improve performance and costs, by moving some of the virtualized network functions (VNF) from the slower servers to the switches. We present our experience building a variant of the CORD architecture for the mobile use case, in which user traffic is processed uniquely on a multi-terabit programmable switching fabric. For this purpose, we built a P4-enabled CORD fabric and implemented on it the LTE’s Serving and Packet Gateway, using P4 to provide capabilities for GTP termination, filtering, and billing. This talk will present benefits and challenges of VNF offloading to programmable switches, cover design principles of a P4-enabled CORD fabric, and discuss plans for other CORD use cases.