P4-BNG: Central Office Network Functions on Programmable Packet Pipelines

Large-scale telecommunications providers have to continuously challenge and evolve their network infrastructure to efficiently serve growing markets demands. They must increase performance, lower time-to-market, provide new services, and lower the cost of the infrastructure and its operation. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) on commodity hardware offers an attractive, low-cost platform to establish innovations much faster than with purpose-built hardware products. Unfortunately, implementing NFV on commodity processors does not match the performance requirements of the high-throughput data plane components in large carrier access networks. In this article, we propose a way to offer residential network access with programmable packet processing architectures. Based on the highly flexible P4 programming language, we present a design and open source implementation of a BNG data plane that meets the challenging demands of Broadband Network Gateways in carrier-grade environments. The proposed evaluation results show the desired performance characteristics and our proposed design together with upcoming P4 hardware can offer a giant leap towards highest performance NFV network access.