PURR: A primitive for reconfigurable fast reroute: Hope for the best and program for the worst

  • Marco Chiesa
  • , Roshan Sedar
  • , Gianni Antichi
  • , Michael Borokhovich
  • , Andrzej Kamisiński
  • , Georgios Nikolaidis
  • , Stefan Schmid

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

39 Scopus citations

Abstract

Highly dependable communication networks usually rely on some kind of Fast Re-Route (FRR) mechanism which allows to quickly re-route traffic upon failures, entirely in the data plane. This paper studies the design of FRR mechanisms for emerging reconfigurable switches. Our main contribution is an FRR primitive for programmable data planes, PURR, which provides low failover latency and high switch throughput, by avoiding packet recirculation. PURR tolerates multiple concurrent failures and comes with minimal memory requirements, ensuring compact forwarding tables, by unveiling an intriguing connection to classic "string theory" (i.e., stringology), and in particular, the shortest common supersequence problem. PURR is well-suited for high-speed match-action forwarding architectures (e.g., PISA) and supports the implementation of arbitrary network-wide FRR mechanisms. Our simulations and prototype implementation (on an FPGA and Tofino) show that PURR improves TCAM memory occupancy by a factor of 1.5x - 10.8x compared to a naïve encoding when implementing state-of-the-art FRR mechanisms. PURR also improves the latency and throughput of datacenter traffic up to a factor of 2.8x - 5.5x and 1.2x - 2x, respectively, compared to approaches based on recirculating packets.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCoNEXT 2019 - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1-14
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450369985
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Dec 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event15th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, CoNEXT 2019 - Orlando, United States
Duration: 9 Dec 201912 Dec 2019

Publication series

NameCoNEXT 2019 - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

Conference

Conference15th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, CoNEXT 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityOrlando
Period9/12/1912/12/19

Keywords

  • Fast failover
  • Fast reroute
  • Network robustness
  • Programmable networks
  • Shortest common supersequence

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture

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