Instant P4STA: Beyond Tbit/s Network Function Evaluation with P4 Programmable Hardware

Cloud data center, backbone, and access networks constantly push the boundaries towards lower latencies, jitter, and scalable throughput. Evaluating data plane devices, i.e., switches, routers, and complex network functions, by developers and service operators under demanding settings is imperative to ensure service resilience in real-world deployments. Our proposed prototype, Instant P4STA, extends a packet timestamping framework for programmable hardware by combining a hardware packet generator with a uniform browser-based packet editor for dynamic packet generation. The user can specify the packet template bit-by-bit, utilizing the Python library Scapy with a vast variety of packet templates. This way, our prototype combines the best features of software and hardware-based packet generators. We demonstrate packet generation up to 3.2 Tbit/s on eight egress ports with up to four packet types in parallel. More packet generation throughput is possible with more egress ports, capped only by the number of physical ports in the programmable hardware.