ZipLine: In-Network Compression at Line Speed

TY - GEN

T1 - ZipLine: In-Network Compression at Line Speed

AU - Vaucher, Sebastien

AU - Yazdani, Niloofar

AU - Felber, Pascal

AU - Lucani Rötter, Daniel Enrique

AU - Schiavoni, Valerio

N1 - Conference code: 20

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - Network appliances continue to offer novel opportunities to offload processing from computing nodes directly into the data plane. One popular concern of network operators and their customers is to move data increasingly faster. A common technique to increase data throughput is to compress it before its transmission. However, this requires compression of the data - -a time and energy demanding preprocessing phase - -and decompression upon reception - -a similarly resource consuming operation. Moreover, if multiple nodes transfer similar data chunks across the network hop (e.g., a given pair of switches), each node effectively wastes resources by executing similar steps. This paper proposes ZipLine, an approach to design and implement (de)compression at line speed leveraging the Tofino hardware platform which is programmable using the P416 language. We report on lessons learned while building the system and show throughput, latency and compression measurements on synthetic and real-world traces, showcasing the benefits and trade-offs of our design.

AB - Network appliances continue to offer novel opportunities to offload processing from computing nodes directly into the data plane. One popular concern of network operators and their customers is to move data increasingly faster. A common technique to increase data throughput is to compress it before its transmission. However, this requires compression of the data - -a time and energy demanding preprocessing phase - -and decompression upon reception - -a similarly resource consuming operation. Moreover, if multiple nodes transfer similar data chunks across the network hop (e.g., a given pair of switches), each node effectively wastes resources by executing similar steps. This paper proposes ZipLine, an approach to design and implement (de)compression at line speed leveraging the Tofino hardware platform which is programmable using the P416 language. We report on lessons learned while building the system and show throughput, latency and compression measurements on synthetic and real-world traces, showcasing the benefits and trade-offs of our design.

KW - P4

KW - compression

KW - generalized deduplication

KW - programmable switches

KW - tofino

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097594809&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3386367.3431302

DO - 10.1145/3386367.3431302

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-7948-9

SP - 399

EP - 406

BT - CoNEXT 2020 - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

T2 - International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

Y2 - 1 December 2020

ER -