In its current form, OpenFlow, the de facto implementation of SDN, separates the network’s control and data planes allowing a central controller to alter the match-action pipeline using a limited set of fields and actions. To support new protocols, forwarding logic, telemetry, monitoring or even middlebox-like functions the currently available programmability in SDN is insufficient. In this paper, we introduce BPFabric, a platform, protocol, and language-independent architecture to centrally program and monitor the data plane. BPFabric leverages eBPF, a platform and protocol independent instruction set to define the packet processing and forwarding functionality of the data plane. We introduce a control plane API that allows data plane functions to be deployed on-the-fly, reporting events of interest and exposing network internal state to the centralised controller. We present a raw socket and DPDK implementation of the design, the former for large-scale experimentation using environment such as Mininet and the latter for highperformance low-latency deployments. We show through examples that functions unrealisable in OpenFlow can leverage this flexibility while achieving similar or better performance to today’s static design.
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