The Data Plane Programming (DPP) subtask in the Network Technology Evolution task (Task 1) of the Network Technologies and Services Development work package (WP6) of the GÉANT GN4-3 project is assessing the applicability and usefulness of  DPP technologies in two use cases of interest to the GÉANT NREN community: DDoS detection and mitigation and high precision network monitoring using In-Band Network Telemetry (INT).

The intermediate results of the data plane programming work on DDoS detection and mitigation were presented at the Performance Management Workshop in March 2020 [download].

In-Band Network Telemetry (INT)

Current Experimentation on INT Implementation in GN4-3

The DPP team in GN4-3 WP6 created a distributed testbed for testing an in-house P4 implementation of In-Band Network Telemetry. The tests are designed to provide performance characteristics of the production network and analyse the infrastructure requirements to best gather and visualise the INT data.  This testbed doesn’t (and isn’t meant to) mimic exactly how INT technology could be deployed inside GÉANT and NREN production networks, instead, it is targeted at validating INT functionalities and capabilities for advanced monitoring. Practical deployment details will depend on the main goal and the granularity of information requested, as an example a specific flow can be selected or generated and monitored end-to-end. The INT information  can be generated only in the two ends, or information can be added up to each intermediate hop, provided it is INT enabled. The node has to provide INT functionality, the most performant are  based on specific hardware (tofino, FPGA, e.g.).