Virtualization of table resources in programmable data plane with global consideration

In this work, we try to address the problem of memory fragmentation in ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) in programmable data plane (PDP), by designing and implementing a novel network hypervisor for PDP, namely, TPVX. TPVX realizes the virtualization of table resources in PDP with global consideration, i.e., when mapping tenant flow tables to physical switches, TPVX considers their table sizes and the pre-formatted sub-tables in the physical network to improve TCAM utilization and avoid memory fragmentation. Our experimental results verify that with TPVX, the utilization of the table resources in PDP can be improved dramatically and the extra processing latency due to the newly-introduced overheads can be maintained well simultaneously.