Study on emerging applications on data plane and optimization possibilities

TL;DR

This paper reviews emerging applications and optimization opportunities in data plane programmability, highlighting recent innovations, challenges, and the need for further performance testing in software-defined networking.

Contribution

It provides an overview of recent developments in data plane programming, discusses integration with control plane solutions, and identifies areas for future research and optimization.

Findings

Most implementations are in test environments.

Control plane solutions are being adapted for data plane.

Emerging applications offer new optimization opportunities.

Abstract

By programming both the data plane and the control plane, network operators can adapt their networks to their needs. Thanks to research over the past decade, this concept has more formulized and more technologically feasible. However, since control plane programmability came first, it has already been successfully implemented in the real network and is beginning to pay off. Today, the data plane programmability is evolving very rapidly to reach this level, attracting the attention of researchers and developers: Designing data plane languages, application development on it, formulizing software switches and architecture that can run data plane codes and the applications, increasing performance of software switch, and so on. As the control plane and data plane become more open, many new innovations and technologies are emerging, but some experts warn that consumers may be confused as to which of the many technologies to choose. This is a testament to how much innovation is emerging in the network. This paper outlines some emerging applications on the data plane and offers opportunities for further improvement and optimization. Our observations show that most of the implementations are done in a test environment and have not been tested well enough in terms of performance, but there are many interesting works, for example, previous control plane solutions are being implemented in the data plane.