A review on P4-Programmable data planes: Architecture, research efforts, and future directions

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising technology that provides flexibility, programmability, and network automation by shifting the network intelligence to the logically centralized controller. In SDN architecture, the controller maintains the global view of network topology; therefore the network management is efficient as compared to the traditional networks. Moreover, the cost of SDN devices is less due to the use of open source network operating system instead of proprietary and vendor-specific software. In spite of the flexibility offered by the SDN, OpenFlow enabled switches have a fixed behavior as specified in the datasheet of switch ASIC. They recognize fixed set of header fields according to the support of OpenFlow version. In addition, SDN is suffering from scalability and performance issues because SDN switches heavily dependent on the control plane to forward the packets which increases the data-control communication overhead. To resolve these issues, P4-Programmable data plane switches can be used. The analysis of review articles about SDN suggests insufficient focus on the data plane programmability. Therefore, this paper provides the comprehensive overview of domain-specific language (P4) for the programmability of the data plane. We have discussed the problems in the traditional SDN architecture and then, how these problems can be managed by the data plane programmability. Further, this study critically analyze the research articles based on the P4 programming language for network traffic monitoring, DDoS attack detection, load balancing, and packet aggregation and disaggregation. Finally, we have identified the research gaps and highlighted the open research challenges in the field of data plane programmability for the future directions.