Programmable Data Plane for New IP using eXpress Data Path (XDP) in Linux

This paper demonstrates a new dimension in packet programming and processing by leveraging New IP technology since applications are sensitive to different types of network constraints. For instance, emerging industry operations, manufacturing, and autonomics are limited by the stochastic quality of services and inflexible address structures. Instead, they require efficiency and deterministic networks. In this paper, we propose a programmable data plane for New IP packet processing and show how network headers could evolve in the future. We demonstrate the implementation of New IP stack to encompass three goals: (1) address customization: applications and routers can forward packets between hosts with different address formats. (2) design an end-to-end model to meet service delivery guarantees: routers implement various in-network New IP contracts as described by the applications. (3) Rapid experimentation of the New IP components. With New IP, developers can describe packet processing functionalities without depending on the specifics of the underlying hardware. Our implementation of New IP stack uses the existing toolsets and capabilities of the Linux platform, such as eXpress Data Path (XDP) and Traffic Control (TC) subsystem. It consists of an end-to-end solution with a new network stack on the host side and a corresponding packet processing and forwarding engine on the network. It is validated using Network Stack Tester (NeST), a lightweight tool built on Linux network namespaces.