Article in Proceedings INPROC-2018-16

BibliographyKohler, Thomas; Mayer, Ruben; Dürr, Frank; Maaß, Marius; Bhowmik, Sukanya; Rothermel, Kurt: P4CEP: Towards In-Network Complex Event Processing.
In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2018 Morning Workshop on In-Network Computing.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology.
NetCompute'18, pp. 0-5, english.
Budapest, Hungary: ACM, August 20, 2018.
DOI: 10.1145/3229591.3229593; ISBN: 978-1-4503-5908-5/18/08.
Article in Proceedings (Conference Paper).
CorporationAssociation for Computing Machinery
CR-SchemaC.2.1 (Network Architecture and Design)
C.2.4 (Distributed Systems)
C.2.3 (Network Operations)
KeywordsIn-network Computing, Data Plane Programming, P4, Complex Event Processing (CEP)
Abstract

In-network computing using programmable networking hardware is a strong trend in networking that promises to reduce latency and consumption of server resources through offloading to network elements (programmable switches and smart NICs). In particular, the data plane programming language P4 together with powerful P4 networking hardware has spawned projects offloading services into the network, e.g., consensus services or caching services. In this paper, we present a novel case for in-network computing, namely, Complex Event Processing (CEP). CEP processes streams of basic events, e.g., stemming from networked sensors, into meaningful complex events. Traditionally, CEP processing has been performed on servers or overlay networks. However, we argue in this paper that CEP is a good candidate for in-network computing along the communication path avoiding detouring streams to distant servers to minimize communication latency while also exploiting processing capabilities of novel networking hardware. We show that it is feasible to express CEP operations in P4 and also present a tool to compile CEP operations, formulated in our P4CEP rule specification language, to P4 code. Moreover, we identify challenges and problems that we have encountered to show future research directions for implementing full-fledged in-network CEP systems.

Full text and
other links
PDF (1550770 Bytes)
DOI
Copyright© ACM 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in NetCompute'18, https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3229591.3229593.
Contactthomas.kohler@ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de
Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Distributed Systems
Project(s)Software-defined Networking
Entry dateJune 11, 2018
   Publ. Department   Publ. Institute   Publ. Computer Science