column:Desigh of SONiC network element control channel container for plymorphic network

To address the modal adaptation and modal control issues in polymorphic network (PINet) for software for open networking in the cloud (SONiC) switch operating system, a SONiC network element control channel container called p4runtime-pins based on P4Runtime was proposed. It enabled multi-modal network element devices to support configuration of various network modal flow tables. In the p4runtime-pins container, a connection with the controller through the gRPC service module was established, a neighboring network element discovery algorithm for controller discovery of links was utilized, and a network element port update algorithm to resolve the issue of port changes in practical application environments was designed. Furthermore, to address the issue of poor support for flow table variations in the hardware forwarding processing unit of SONiC network element switches, the internal flow table dumping and gRPC network element proxy functionality was introduced in p4runtime-pins to facilitate the deployment of different network modal flow tables. Experimental results demonstrate that the p4runtime-pins container has low resource consumption, occupying only 1.70% of CPU and 0.45% of memory. Moreover, SONiC network element devices deployed with the p4runtime-pins container can accurately receive and configure flow table rules issued by the controller, with an only 0.027~0.037 s flow table configuration delay.