Institute of Network Engineering
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Programmable Network Switches

Term: Spring 2024

Level: Graduate

Instructor:

Prof. Shie-Yuan Wang (王協源)

Email: shieyuan@cs.nycu.edu.tw

Office: EC413

Office hours: Mondays C D

Phone: (03) 5131550

Laboratory: Network and System Laboratory

URL: http://www.cs.nycu.edu.tw/~shieyuan

Course Home Page:

http://www.cs.nctu.edu.tw/~shieyuan/course/PN/2024

Course Announcement and Discussion Forum:

The E3 course platform

Teaching Assistants:

游庭瑋 Email: edward.yu0830@gmail.com Phone 54706 Office: EC215

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General Information

Course description:

Recently, with the availability of programmable switches, complex actions can be performed in the pipelines of network switches to process packets at the 100, 400, or 800 Gbps line rate! This capability has created a very important new research field named "In-Network Computing" (INC) and many novel and intelligent applications based on INC have been proposed in recent years. Due to its importance and huge potential, in the past few years, many INC papers have been published in the proceedings of top international conferences and journals.

The goal of this course is to study the architecture, design, and implementation of programmable network switches, and the research issues involved in developing their applications for operational networks. We will first teach control-plane-programmable SDN/OpenFlow switches and then teach data-plane-programmable P4 switches, which are the evolved version of SDN/OpenFlow switches and much more powerful than SDN/OpenFlow switches.

In this course, a student will take two hands-on lab experiments. The first one will be conducted on open vswitch OpenFlow switches while the second one will be conducted on BMv2 P4 switches.

Two students will form a group to collaboratively study an assigned paper, orally present it in the class, and answer questions raised by the teacher and other students. The same group will conduct a P4 research project using the BMv2 P4 switch emulator, orally present the results of the project in the class, and submit a 10-page written report.

Prerequisite:

“Introduction to Computer Networks”

Lectures:

The course will be held physically on Tuesdays from 1:20 pm to 3:10 pm in ED302 room. The third hour of a week will be given as recorded video for asynchronous study.

Coursework:

• Read slides
• Do two lab experiments and submit their reports
• Take a mid-term exam and a final exam
• Study an assigned paper with your group member
• Orally present the assigned paper in the class with your group member
• Participate in the paper discussions in the class
• Do a project with your group member
• Orally present the results of the project in the class with your group member
• Write a 10-page project report with your group member

Grading Policy:

• Mid-term exam 20%
• Final exam 20%
• Assigned paper reading and in-class presentation 10%
• Class participation and discussion 10%
• Two labs 20% (10% each)
• Final project oral presentation 10%
• Final project written report 10%

Course Policies:

• The penalty for a late submission is: Its final score = its original score * (3/4) ^ #_late_days.
• Only your own work. Discussions are allowed and encouraged. Copy & paste is not allowed and will be punished.

References

• OpenFlow standards specifications
• P4_14 language specifications
• P4_16 language specifications
• P4Runtime specifications
• In-band Network Telemetry (INT) specifications
• SDN/P4 research papers
• In-network computing (INC) papers
• Specifications of commercial programmable switches

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