Implementation and Evaluation of Activity-Based Congestion Management Using P4 (P4-ABC)

Abstract

Activity-Based Congestion management (ABC) is a novel domain-based QoS mechanism providing more fairness among customers on bottleneck links. It avoids per-flow or per-customer states in the core network and is suitable for application in future 5G networks. However, ABC cannot be configured on standard devices. P4 is a novel programmable data plane specification which allows defining new headers and forwarding behavior. In this work, we implement an ABC prototype using P4 and point out challenges experienced during implementation. Experimental validation of ABC using the P4-based prototype reveals the desired fairness results.