Virtual Queues for P4: A Poor Man’s Programmable Traffic Manager

The advent of programmable network switch ASICs and recent developments on other data planes (NPUs, FPGAs) drive the renewed interest in plane programmability. P4 language has emerged as a strong candidate to describe protocol independent datapath pipeline. With its supported architectures, provides an excellent way define packet processing forwarding behavior, while leaving networking components such traffic management engine, non-programmable fixed function elements, based capabilities most devices. However, flexibility is essential meet Quality Service (QoS) requirements flows. Thus, enabling control for fixed-function elements like crucial. Towards that end we propose use virtual queues pipeline, investigate application queue-based management, portability approach using different targets. Specifically, focus queue Active Queue Management (AQM) congestion policing meeting latency targets distinct slices. solution compared built-in functionality bandwidth meters, proving also additional dimensions are achieved without compromising complexity solution.