P4SC: Towards High-Performance Service Function Chain Implementation on the P4-Capable Device

Most Service Function Chains (SFCs) in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are realized on the software or offloading to the network interface card (NIC) and FPGA. However, the software introduces significant performance overhead while the NIC and FPGA suffer from the limited processing capability and the development complexity, respectively. In response, we present P4SC, a system for implementing SFCs on the P4-capable device. P4SC provides the high-performance and flexible SFC implementation by combining the hardware capability and the P4 programmability. It offers some high-level primitives for operators to build the SFC requests and converts the requests to a corresponding P4 program. Moreover, P4SC merges several SFCs to implement them on the same target while observing the P4 grammar. Besides, P4SC provides the runtime management of SFCs by wrapping the low-level device APIs. We evaluate the P4SC performance on various P4 devices, including a Barefoot Tofino switch. Experimental results show that compared to a state-of-the-art NFV framework, P4SC can achieve a 96.98% SFC processing delay decrease on the P4-capable device.