Performance guarantees for P4 through cost analysis

For modern switches operating with terabit-scale bandwidth it is important to achieve guarantees of highperformance as early as possible in the design and development process. P4 is the state-of-art programming language for defining the control flow of SDN network switches. The most computationally intensive part of the program flow are the lookup tables. Unfortunately, the execution semantics of P4 lookup tables is highly implementation dependent.Continuing our previous work on P4 parsers, we propose, classify, and evaluate implementation-level cost models for P4 programs composed of parser and lookup constructs, enabling developers to estimate program execution costs (with CPU cycle precision) before actually deploying the solution to hardware.