P4Net: Facilitating Computation-oriented Communication Using P4-based SDN

The emergence of compute-intensive applications, such as 3D rendering and real-time image analysis, require col-laboration of network and computation for optimal performance. However, existing network solutions fail to achieve on-demand task steering, resulting in poor resource utilization. To address this challenge, this paper introduce P4Net, a novel network-layer design leveraging the Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processor (P4) programmable data plane to enable optimal computation task steering through three key innovations. Firstly, P4Net incorporates the computation-oriented service identifier (CoSI), which uses a hierarchical structure to support fine-grained task descriptions and resource matching. Secondly, a computation-oriented forwarding mechanism is proposed to enable statefu session. Thirdly, P4Net adopts fine-grained ser-vice matching for on-demand and dynamic task steering. To implement P4Net, a prototype system is built in a practical WAN environment. Experimental results demonstrate that P4Net reduces communication latency, achieves line-rate forwarding, and maintains high system resilience under network failures.