Network Coding for Critical Infrastructure Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a programmable network architecture utilizing linear network coding via P4 to enhance resilience in critical infrastructure networks, demonstrating practical implementation and performance benefits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture for implementing linear network coding in programmable networks, decomposing coding functions into primitives and validating with an empirical prototype.

Findings

Linear network coding improves resilience in critical networks.

Practical implementation achieves theoretical gains with manageable processing costs.

Prototype demonstrates feasibility and performance benefits.

Abstract

The applications in the critical infrastructure systems pose simultaneous resilience and performance requirements to the underlying computer network. To meet such requirements, the networks that use the store-and-forward paradigm poses stringent conditions on the redundancy in the network topology and results in problems that becoming computationally challenging to solve at scale. However, with the advent of programmable data-planes, it is now possible to use linear network coding (NC) at the intermediate network nodes (i.e. hardware and software switches) to meet resilience requirements of the applications. To that end, we propose an architecture that realizes linear NC in programmable networks by decomposing the linear NC functions into the atomic coding primitives. We designed and implemented the primitives using the features offered by the P4 ecosystem. Using an empirical evaluation of an open-source prototype, we show that the theoretical gains promised by linear network coding can be realized with a per-packet processing cost.