Barefoot Networks, Inc.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP

Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Intel Corporation

Other

Jeongkeun Lee

Changhoon Kim

Anurag Agrawal

Xiaozhou Li

Georgios Nikolaidis

John Nathan Foster

Robert Soule

Patrick W Bosshart

Sung-Ju Lee

Michael Gregory Ferrara

Jay Evan Scott Peterson

Remy Chang

Michael Feng

Masoud Moshref Javadi

Yi Li

Souvik Sen

Milad Sharif

Puneet Sharma

Rong Pan

Ethan M Spiegel

Steven Licking

Joon-Myung Kang

Ying Zhang

Yoshio Frank Turner

Robert G Southworth

Han Wang

Srivathsa Dhruvanarayan

Parag Dattatraya Bhide

Stephane Laroche

Roberto Penaranda Cebrian

Alain Loge

Malek Musleh

Cole Nathan Schlesinger

Steffen Julif Smolka

William Hallahan

Pedro Yebenes Segura

Jithin Thomas

Mon Jed Liu

Kyu-Han Kim

Charles F Clark

Taekyoung Kwon

Raul Herman Etkin

Ashutosh Agrawal

Ramkumar Krishnamoorthy

Eugene Songyou Chai

Shruthi Krishnan

Thomas Hogan

Scott A Lindsay

Myung Jin Lee

Andre Lam

Ashkan Nikravesh

Jeremias Blendin

Examples described herein relate to a network agent, when operational, to: receive a packet, determine transmit rate-related information for a sender network device based at least on operational and telemetry information accumulated in the received packet, and transmit the transmit rate-related information to the sender network device. In some examples, the network agent includes a network device coupled to a server, a server, or a network device. In some examples, the operational and telemetry information comprises: telemetry information generated by at least one network device in a path from the sender network device to the network agent.

Receiver-based precision congestion control

Examples described herein relate to a network element comprising an ingress pipeline and at least one queue from which to egress packets. The network element can receive a packet and generate a congestion notification packet at the ingress pipeline to a sender of the packet based on detection of congestion in a target queue that is to store the packet and before the packet is stored in a congested target queue. The network element can generate a congestion notification packet based on a queue depth of the target queue and likelihood the target queue is congested. The likelihood the queue is congested can be based on a probabilistic function including one or more of Proportional-Integral (PI) or Random Early Detection (RED). The network element can determine a pause time for the sender to pause sending particular packets based at least on a time for the target queue to drain to a target level.

Congestion management techniques

Some embodiments of the invention provide a forwarding element (e.g., a switch, a router, etc.) that has one or more data plane, message-processing pipelines with key-value processing circuits. The forwarding element's data plane key-value circuits allow the forwarding element to perform key-value services that would otherwise have to be performed by data compute nodes connected by the network fabric that includes the forwarding element. In some embodiments, the key-value (KV) services of the forwarding element and other similar forwarding elements supplement the key-value services of a distributed set of key-value servers by caching a subset of the most commonly used key-value pairs in the forwarding elements that connect the set of key-value servers with their client applications. In some embodiments, the key-value circuits of the forwarding element perform the key-value service operations at message-processing line rates at which the forwarding element forwards messages to the data compute nodes and/or to other network forwarding elements in the network fabric.

Network forwarding element with key-value processing in the data plane

Some embodiments provide a method for an ingress packet processing pipeline of a network forwarding integrated circuit (IC). The ingress packet processing pipeline is for receiving packets from a port of the network forwarding IC and processing the packets to assign different packets to different queues of a traffic management unit of the network forwarding IC. The method receives state data from the traffic management unit. The method stores the state data in a stateful table. The method assigns a particular packet to a particular queue based on the state data received from the traffic management unit and stored in the stateful table.

Using stateful traffic management data to perform packet processing

An example system includes a transceiver. The transceiver communicates multicast frames to a plurality of client devices in a multicast group. The system further includes a controller. The controller determines that a predetermined time has passed since the transceiver most recently sent a unicast transmission to one of the plurality of client devices. The controller instructs the transceiver to transmit a unicast frame to the one of the plurality of client devices. The controller computes a data rate for the one of the plurality of client devices based on the transmission of the unicast frame to the one of the plurality of client devices.

Transmissions of unicast frames to client devices

Some embodiments of the invention provide a forwarding element that has a data-plane circuit (data plane) that can be configured to implement a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack detector. The data plane has several stages of configurable data processing circuits, which are typically configured to process data tuples associated with data messages received by the forwarding element in order to forward the data messages within a network. In some embodiments, the configurable data processing circuits of the data plane can also be configured to implement a DDoS attack detector (DDoS detector) in the data plane. In some embodiments, the forwarding element has a control-plane circuit (control plane) that configures the configurable data processing circuits of the data plane, while in other embodiments, a remote controller configures these data processing circuits.

Forwarding element with a data plane DDoS attack detector

A method for verifying data plane programs is provided in some embodiments. Because the behavior of a data plane program (e.g., a program written in the P4 language) is determined in part by the control plane populating match-action tables with specific forwarding rules, in some embodiments, programmers are provided with a way to document assumptions about the control plane using annotations (e.g., in the form of 'assertions' or 'assumptions' about the state based on the unknown control plane contribution). In some embodiments, annotations are added automatically to verify common properties, including checking that every header read or written is valid, that every expression has a well-defined value, and that all standard metadata is manipulated correctly. The method in some embodiments translates programs from a first language (e.g., P4) to a second language (e.g., Guarded Command Language (GCL)) for verification by a satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) solver.

Data plane program verification

Embodiments described herein describe a network tester that is configured to perform packet modification at an egress pipeline of a programmable packet engine. A packet stream is received at an egress pipeline of an output port of the programmable packet engine, wherein the output port includes a packet modifier. Packets of the packet stream are modified at the packet modifier. The packet stream including modified packets is transmitted through an egress pipeline of the output port.

Network testing using a programmable packet engine

Some embodiments of the invention provide a data-plane forwarding circuit (data plane) that can be configured to identify large data message flows that it processes for forwarding in a network. In this document, large data message flows are referred to as heavy hitter flows. To perform its forwarding operations, the data plane includes several data message processing stages that are configured to process the data tuples associated with the data messages received by the data plane. In some embodiments, parts of the data plane message-processing stages are also configured to implement a heavy hitter detection (HHD) circuit. The operations of the data plane's message processing stages are configured by a control plane of the data plane's forwarding element in some embodiments.

Data plane with heavy hitter detector

Some embodiments of the invention provide a method for reporting congestion in a network that includes several forwarding elements. In a data plane circuit of one of the forwarding elements, the method detects that a queue in the switching circuit of the data plane circuit is congested, while a particular data message is stored in the queue as it is being processed through the data plane circuit. In the data plane circuit, the method then generates a report regarding the detected queue congestion, and sends this report to a data collector external to the forwarding element. To send the report, the data plane circuit in some embodiments duplicates the particular data message, stores it in the duplicate data message information regarding the detected queue congestion, and sends the duplicate data message to the external data collector.

Identifying congestion in a network

Some embodiments provide a data-plane forwarding circuit that can be configured to learn about a new message flow and to maintain metadata about the new message flow without first having a control plane first configure the data plane to maintain metadata about the flow. To perform its forwarding operations, the data plane includes several data message processing stages that are configured to process the data tuples associated with the data messages received by the data plane. In some embodiments, parts of the data plane message-processing stages are also configured to operate as a flow-tracking circuit that includes (1) a flow-identifying circuit to identify message flows received by the data plane, and (2) a first set of storages to store metadata about the identified flows.

Data plane for learning flows, collecting metadata regarding learned flows and exporting metadata regarding learned flows

Growing community of inventors

Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Jeongkeun Lee