P4QoS: QoS-based Packet Processing with P4

Abstract

Networks often need to concurrently process mil- lions of flows with varying Quality-of-Service (QoS) require- ments. Doing so by deploying flow-specific rules at network nodes would require significant memory and overhead.
In this paper, we take a fundamentally different approach, called P4QoS, by embedding QoS requirements in the packets themselves and leveraging P4-programmable network switches to process the traffic based on them. We illustrate and evaluate our approach with latency as our QoS metric, but our concept can be applied to other metrics as well. Our evaluation, both in software (Mininet) and in hardware (Intel Tofino), shows that P4QoS can satisfy application-specific QoS requirements with negligible memory overhead.