A Hands-on Tutorial on P4 Programmable Data Planes

Overview

This tutorial provides Information Technology (IT) professionals with hands-on exercises on P4 programmable data plane switches, covering from introductory to advanced topics. Programmable data plane switches have recently emerged, attracting significant attention from the industry and the academia. They permit operators and programmers in general to run customized packet processing functions in the data plane at terabit rates, thus paving the way for an unprecedented wave of innovation and experimentation by reducing the time of designing, testing, and adopting new protocols; enabling a customized, top-down approach to develop network applications; providing granular visibility of packet events defined by the programmer; reducing complexity and enhancing resource utilization of the programmable switches; and drastically improving the performance of applications that are offloaded to the data plane. This tutorial will permit each attendee to execute virtual laboratory experiments, covering a wide range of features and topics related to P4 programmable switches, from introductory to advanced levels.

Outcomes

By the end of this tutorial, attendees will:

Intended Audience

The tutorial is targeted to IT educators and professionals such as system administrators, network engineers, practitioners. The content is suitable for instructors who want to incorporate advanced material into their networking classes. The content is available for NETLAB systems.
 

Pre-requisites

The laboratory environment consists of routers, switches, and hosts deployed in IPv4 networks. Attendees are expected to know basic networking (IPv4, local area networks, OSI model). Training activities will be conducted using NetLab. Attendees will be provided with a username and a password.

Agenda

 DAY 1: Monday, March 6