Hardware-Based Evaluation of Scalable and Resilient Multicast With BIER in P4

Traditional IP multicast (IPMC) maintains state per IPMC group in core devices to distribute one-to-many traffic along tree-like structures through the network. This limits its scalability because whenever subscribers of groups change, forwarding network needs be updated. Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER) has been proposed by IETF for efficient transport without need IPMC-group-dependent devices. However, legacy do not offer required features implement BIER. P4 is a programming language which follows software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm. It provides programmable data plane packet processing pipeline The contribution this article threefold. First, we provide hardware-based prototype BIER and fast reroute (BIER-FRR) leverages recirculation. Our target P4-programmable high-performance switching ASIC Tofino; source code publicly available. Second, perform an experimental evaluation, with regard failover time throughput, shows that up 100 Gb/s throughput can obtained failures affect less than 1 ms. decrease if switch-internal loss occurs due missing recirculation capacity. As remedy, add more capacity turning physical ports into loopback mode. To quantify problem, derive prediction model reduced whose results are good accordance measured values. Third, provisioning rule ports, applicable general programs, avoid In case study show requires only few such under realistic mixes unicast traffic.