SDN Enabled L2 Switch Implementation and Its Performance Evaluation Through P4 Programming

The concept of SDN (Software-Defined Networking) originally came with the purpose of disaggregating control plane and data plane. However, current scope of SDN has surpassed the original goal. It sets out to introduce programmability in the control plane for better visibility and manageability of networking devices. The idea has been recently extended to program the data plane. In the present scenario P4 (Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processors) stands as the de-facto language to program the data plane. In this study, we implemented an L2 (Layer 2) switch and evaluated it performance using P4 programming language. The performance of the switch was evaluated in terms of throughput (Mbps) and latency (ms). The throughput was found to be nominal as the switch was implemented in software and the latency for first packet was also high since the switch’s table was empty. However, once the table was filled, subsequent packets suffered very low latency.