Developing EFSM-based stateful applications with FlowBlaze.p4 and ONOS

Stateful networking functions that can be offloaded on programmable data planes are gaining interest for their potential efficiency in using hardware resources and their ability to process large traffic volumes at high speed. However, the success of this function virtualization paradigm largely depends on the availability of fast prototyping environments for the developer community and the integration with state of the art SDN controllers. In this demo, we present FlowBlaze.p4 and its integration with the ONOS SDN controller. FlowBlaze.p4 is an Extended Finite State Machines (EFSM) executor implemented in P4 that can run on BMv2, helping to prototype new use cases with a small turnaround time. We integrated FlowBlaze.p4 with ONOS and Trellis to deploy stateful network applications within full SDN-based data-center fabrics. We demonstrate the platform with two scenarios showing the workflow to use and deploy the proposed library to implement new use cases.