The idea behind Software Defined Networking is to substitute the current network devices with programmable elements that will provide to network engineers an enormous flexibility to modify and update the network behavior. The most affirmed programming abstraction for SDN is based on the use of multiple MATs (Match-Action Tables). This abstraction allows selecting the set of actions that must be performed on each incoming packet. Until now, most of the research effort focused on the match operation, leaving the definition and implementation of the actions to the specific HW device or to the vendors.
Instead, in this project we identify the possible actions that a network device should apply to the processed packets (MPLS labeling, encapsulation and de-encapsulation, NAT etc.) and we describe an HW architecture able to efficiently perform theise actions. The HW architecture, that we called packet manipulation processor (PMP), is an implementation of an array of small RISC microprocessors, in which the memory architecture and the instruction set has been optimized to better accomplish the specific task of packet manipulation.
The PMP simulator process a pcap trace, extract the relevant header informations and activates a sepcific five-stage MIPS CPU Pipelined to manimulate the packet trace. The MIPS simulator is based on the original simulator developed by Christopher Lord (https://github.com/clord/MIPS-CPU-Simulator).
These instructions have been tested on Ubuntu 12.04. Other distributions or versions may need different steps.
Run the following commands in the PMP simulator directory to build everything:
$ make
-
assembly the microprogram
$ ./rasm -f source_fileThis will create a output .text file with the binary executable code (source_file.t) and a .data file with the memory data section (source_file.d).
-
launch the PMP simulator
$ ./rsim -p trace.pcap -t program.t -d program.dThe simulator will parse the packet trace trace.pcap and will launch the PMP simulator that will execute the program in program.t with data program.d
We provided two simple application examples (NAPT and ARP reply) for testing the PMP simulator. The examples read the one-packet trace provided in the pcaps directory, executes the application and writes in the out.pcap file the result. The two examples are:
-
NAPT
$ ./rasm -f programs/napt.s $ ./rsim -p pcaps/udp.pcap -t programs/napt.t -d programs/napt.d -
ARP Reply
$ ./rasm -f programs/arp.s
$ ./rsim -p pcaps/arp.pcap -t programs/arp.t -d programs/arp.d
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# Contribute
Please submit your bug reports, fixes and suggestions as pull requests on GitHub, or by contacting us directly.
# License
The MIT License
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