Programmable Ethernet Switches and Their Applications

Original · EN

Modern Ethernet switches support many advanced features beyond route learning and packet forwarding such as VLAN tagging, IGMP snooping, rate limiting, and status monitoring, which can be controlled through a programmatic interface. Traditionally, these features are mostly used to statically configure a network. This paper proposes to apply them as dynamic control mechanisms to maximize physical network link resources, to minimize failure recovery time, to enforce QoS requirements, and to support link-layer multicast without broadcasting. With these advanced programmable control mechanisms, standard Ethernet switches can be used as effective building blocks for metropolitan-area Ethernet networks (MEN), storage-area networks (SAN), and computation cluster interconnects. We demonstrate the usefulness of this new level of control over Ethernet switches with a MEN architecture that features multi-fold throughput gains and sub-second failure recovery time.