Toward In-Network Event Detection and Filtering for Publish/Subscribe Communication Using Programmable Data Planes

• Published in: IEEE eTransactions on network and service management 2021-03, Vol.18 (1), p.415-428
• Main Authors: Vestin, Jonathan, Kassler, Andreas, Laki, Sandor, Pongracz, Gergely
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Boolean algebra; Control systems; Customization; Electronic devices; Event detection; Industrial applications; Interface cards; Internet of Things; Jitter; Network interface cards; Network latency; Process control; programmable data planes; Programmable logic devices; publish/subscribe; Scalability; Servers; Switches; Time series; Vibration
• ISSN: 1932-4537; 1932-4537
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2020.3040011

Industrial Internet of Things (I-IoT) applications require a large number of sensor data to be processed under tight delay and jitter constraints. In such applications, flexible event detection and fast reaction to critical events is an important building block. Traditional approaches use either proprietary networks and dedicated hardware or transmit sensor data towards processing elements in the Cloud or at the Network Edge, using distributed stream processing frameworks. For scalability, a large number of servers are needed and processing on commodity CPUs typically involves high and unpredictable latency. In this article, we explore how programmable data planes can be used to detect events flexibly and trigger customized and programmable actions directly from the switch program or the programmable network interface card (SmartNIC). We present FastReact-PS, an event-based publish/subscribe I-IoT processing framework in P4 language, which can be flexibly customized from the control plane. Together with stateful processing, FastReact-PS supports windowed time series analysis as well as complex event detection and processing based on Boolean logic directly in the data plane of newly emerging programmable networking devices. The logic can be adjusted dynamically from the control plane without the need for recompilation. We implement FastReact-PS in P4 and evaluate it on both a SmartNIC and a DPDK-based software switch running in user space. Our evaluation shows that the latency is reduced by one order of magnitude compared to end-host based approaches at significantly lower jitter while being scalable to processing up to 11 million events per second.