Towards Multiple Pipelines Network Emulation with P7.

Network emulation traditionally relies on software-based solutions. While extremely useful in many scenarios, it suffers from performance fidelity and inherent scalability constraints. With the advent of P4 and programmable switches like Tofino, new opportunities for hardware-based network emulation are emerging. P7 (P4 Programmable Patch Panel) offers a solution for high-fidelity 100G traffic network emulation, including different link characteristics such as latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth, as well as the ability to define custom topologies. However, it currently lacks support for custom P4 code in emulated devices. This is where multiple pipelines network emulation comes in. In this demonstration, we show how to emulate a topology using P7 and incorporate custom P4 code into each emulated node. We allocate a dedicated pipe for user-defined P4 code and allow users to configure tables for each node separately.