Thesis
Time-Aware Packet Forwarding in Programmable Data Planes
Washington State University
Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
07/2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000007988
Abstract
Networks in many safety-critical systems like avionics, automotive, and industrial plants have strict end-to-end delay requirements to be met for correct system operation. Existing software-defined real-time networks do not support data plane programmability provided by recent protocol-independent switch architectures such as P4. My research enables time-aware flow forwarding in P4-enabled software-defined time-critical networks. In this thesis, I introduce time-aware flow scheduling for P4-enabled SDN architectures. I study two scheduling policies: the first one prioritizes flows based on slack (i.e., how much time is left to reach the destination), and the second one uses finish time as a priority metric, which is determined from its data rate requirements. Both approaches were implemented and tested in the P4 software stack. I find that the slack-based forwarding scheme performs better in retaining real-time requirements. My publicly released scheduler implementations will assist network engineers in adapting programmable switches to safety-critical applications that demand precise timing guarantees.
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Details
- Title
- Time-Aware Packet Forwarding in Programmable Data Planes
- Creators
- Yuqun Song
- Contributors
- Monowar Hasan (Advisor)Assefaw Gebremedhin (Committee Member) - Washington State University, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceXu Lin (Committee Member) - Washington State University, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 31
- Identifiers
- 99901297595701842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis