A survey on data plane programming with P4: Fundamentals, advances, and applied research

Programmable data planes allow users to define their own plane algorithms for network devices including appropriate application programming interfaces (APIs) which may be leveraged by user-defined software-defined networking (SDN) control. This offers great flexibility customization, it specialized, commercial appliances, e.g., in 5G or center networks, rapid prototyping industrial and academic research. Programming protocol-independent packet processors (P4) has emerged as the currently most widespread abstraction, language, concept programming. It is developed standardized an open community, supported various software hardware platforms. In first part of this paper we give a tutorial models, P4 architectures, compilers, targets, APIs. We also consider research efforts advance technology. second part, categorize large body literature P4-based applied into different domains, summarize contributions these papers, extract prototypes, target platforms, source code availability. For each domain, analyze how reviewed works benefit from P4’s core features. Finally, discuss potential next steps based on our findings.