Programmable Ethernet Switches and Their Applications
Srikant Sharma, Tzi-cker Chiueh

TL;DR
This paper explores how programmable Ethernet switches can be dynamically controlled to optimize network performance, reliability, and QoS, enabling advanced applications in metropolitan, storage, and cluster networks.
Contribution
It introduces a novel approach to utilize Ethernet switch features as dynamic control mechanisms for enhanced network management and performance.
Findings
Achieved multi-fold throughput gains in MEN architecture
Demonstrated sub-second failure recovery time
Enabled advanced network control features
Abstract
Modern Ethernet switches support many advanced features beyond route learning and packet forwarding such as VLAN tagging, IGMP snooping, rate limiting, and status monitoring, which can be controlled through a programmatic interface. Traditionally, these features are mostly used to statically configure a network. This paper proposes to apply them as dynamic control mechanisms to maximize physical network link resources, to minimize failure recovery time, to enforce QoS requirements, and to support link-layer multicast without broadcasting. With these advanced programmable control mechanisms, standard Ethernet switches can be used as effective building blocks for metropolitan-area Ethernet networks (MEN), storage-area networks (SAN), and computation cluster interconnects. We demonstrate the usefulness of this new level of control over Ethernet switches with a MEN architecture that…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Optical Network Technologies · Software-Defined Networks and 5G · Network Time Synchronization Technologies
