P4-LISP: A P4-Based High-Performance Router for the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol

The networking paradigm locator/identifier split decouples locating and identifying functionality of addresses. Thereby it improves multi-homing, fail-over, mobility, traffic engineering over the Internet, and routing scalability.The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is a prominent incarnation of that paradigm which recently became an Internet standard. However, existing LISP implementations are either proprietary or have limited performance, which makes their deployment difficult in high-speed networks. Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) is a programming language that facilitates the implementation of custom data plane processing on high-performance switches with line rates of up to 400 Gbit/s.In this work, we present P4-LISP, an open-source P4-based proof of concept implementation of a high-performance LISP router. It supports all relevant features such as ITR, ETR, RTR, P-ITR, P-ETR, NAT-traversal, LISP-NAT, and mobile nodes. As control plane, the open-source implementation lispers.net has been integrated on the switch. Security features are added to protect the control plane from being overloaded by the high-performance data plane. The paper describes the architecture of P4-LISP in detail and extensively evaluates performance, functionality, controller performance, and overload protection.