Troubleshooting Programmable Data Planes via Real-Time Table Information Recording

While the flexibility of programmable switches brings opportunities, it also introduces security risks. Hence, it is vital to conduct effective troubleshooting in the programmable switch to mitigate frequent network failures. However, troubleshooting programmable switch failures is challenging due to their enhanced flexibility and functionality compared to regular switches, posing increased difficulty in debugging, particularly with limited debugging tools and information. To address this problem, we propose an efficient troubleshooting method that records real-time information about packets in the data plane, including the tables involved in packet processing. Unfortunately, due to hardware limitations, it is infeasible to record all tables’ information in the data plane. Thus, the key is to find the table set reflecting the execution path a packet goes through while minimizing the resource overhead. We first represent P4 programs as a probabilistic transition directed acyclic graph (DAG) and employ information entropy to quantify the information within a set of tracked tables. Then, we adopt a two-step approach and design algorithms to find both optimal and approximately optimal table record plans. The evaluation results show the efficacy of the proposed method, including achieving the same path recovery rate as the related works with less than one-third of the resource consumption.