Paxos Made Switch-y

TL;DR

This paper implements the Paxos consensus protocol in the P4 language for network devices, aiming to enhance data center infrastructure performance and explore consensus as a network service.

Contribution

It presents the first implementation of Paxos in P4, demonstrating the feasibility and potential benefits of moving consensus logic into the network data plane.

Findings

Paxos was successfully implemented in P4.

Network device-based consensus can improve performance.

This work sets a foundation for consensus as a network service.

Abstract

This paper describes an implementation of the well-known consensus protocol, Paxos, in the P4 programming language. P4 is a language for programming the behavior of network forwarding devices (i.e., the network data plane). Moving consensus logic into network devices could significantly improve the performance of the core infrastructure and services in data centers. Moreover, implementing Paxos in P4 provides a critical use case and set of requirements for data plane language designers. In the long term, we imagine that consensus could someday be offered as a network service, just as point-to-point communication is provided today.