A P4-Based Packet Scheduling Approach for Clustered Deep Packet Inspection Appliances
Ping Jiang, Shuo Zhang, Qingyun Liu, Chao Zheng · 2021
Packet scheduling approach enables clustered deep packet inspection (DPI) appliances to achieve stateful packet processing through efficient cooperation. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology of packet scheduling, called P4CLUS, for clustering DPI appliances efficiently. P4CLUS eliminates unnecessary packet transmission between peer nodes via the idea of packet path prediction. It performs sketch-based measurement on traffic handling nodes to record their flow distributions and then compresses the results to a compact packet forwarding table. Our approach guarantees per-flow consistency with lower bandwidth overhead and is effective in the practice of eliminating asymmetric traffic in stateful DPI. We construct the P4CLUS prototype with P4 on Protocol-Independent Switch Architecture (PISA). Our evaluation shows that P4CLUS can reduce the bandwidth overhead by up to 73.75% than the hash-based method, and only requires 2MB SRAM and 80KB TCAM resources at most.