The P4 Workshop is one of the most significant annual events organized by the P4 organization. The P4 Workshop brings together the developers and researchers from academia as well as industry who are working with the P4 language creating innovative applications and use cases by providing them a platform to showcase their work via technical talks and demos.
In this edition, the demo “P7 (P4 Programmable Patch Panel): An Instant 100G Emulated Network Testbed in a Pizza Box” presented by our INTRIG/FEEC/UNICAMP member Fabricio Rodríguez (Ph.D. Student) won the Most Novel Application in a Networking Use Case award.
In the demonstration, Fabricio discusses options to validate a network topology, including the link metrics, which are traditionally based on virtual environments which limit experimentation with transmission speeds over 10Gbps. With the programmability that P4 brings to the network and the capabilities of new generation hardware supporting the PSA (Portable Switch Architecture) and TNA (Tofino Native Architecture) P4 architectures, he defines emulation characteristics of the links and demonstrates a network topology with high fidelity and computation power using a single physical P4 switch.
