NETREACT: Distributed Event Detection in Sensor Data Streams with Disaggregated Packet Processing Pipelines

A new phenomenon called in-network computing has recently emerged with the aim of offloading calculations beyond the traditional task of packet forwarding to network switches. One of the most studied in-network computing applications is processing of sensor data streams. Existing works such as FastReact focus on solving this problem using flexible SmartNICs. In this paper, we propose NETREACT: an improved ASIC-oriented design for distributed event detection in sensor data streams to achieve a disaggregated processing pipeline. In contrast to existing approaches, NETREACT distributes the event detection task among a set of switches while leveraging the capabilities of the Intel Tofino platform in terms of boosting throughput and reducing latency. The proposed event-rule disaggregation method has the advantage of overcoming the hardware resource constraints and improving the overall network performance.