Implementation of P4-Based Schedulers for Multipath Communication

Multipath communication is a well-developed technology that enhances communication effectiveness and resilience. Moreover, it can flexibly utilize network resources through load balancing among available paths. However, traditionally, deploying such load balancing functions on network devices is costly due to the required configuration changes and complicated signaling mechanisms on the devices’ control planes. Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) has recently emerged as a programming language that enables programmability on the data plane, with the potential to relieve such issues in multipath communication. This work introduces and implements three P4-based multipath schedulers that can split traffic over several paths in wireless networks. The first is P4-based Random Splitting, which distributes traffic randomly. The second is P4-based Weighted Round Robin, with path scheduling based on weights in accordance with path capability. The last is P4-based Dynamic Weighted Round Robin (DWRR), which can improve bandwidth utilization by shifting the weights following dynamic changes in the available bandwidth (i.e., when congestion occurs). We have extensively evaluated the implementation of these three P4-based schedulers in a Mininet-WiFi/P4 environment with User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic. The results show that these schedulers can achieve multipath communication with the designed scheduling mechanisms.