Contributed by Sándor Laki (Assistant Professor, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary)
The annual EuroP4 is the official European workshop of the P4 Language Consortium. It aims to bring together programmable network researchers from Europe and around the world to discuss innovations and ideas as well as foster the growth of the P4 community. The event took place in Charleroi, Belgium, on October 28th in conjunction with IEEE ICNP 2024.
EuroP4 2024 was a full day of great presentations covering various topics, from queueing and cryptographic hash calculation to intrusion detection and SCION routing. We had two excellent keynote speakers.
The first was Mario Baldi (AMD), who presented a talk titled “SmartNICs—P4’s Latest Frontier—Challenges and Opportunities Ahead” in the morning session. The talk explored and reviewed the widely differing architectures of programmable SmartNICs currently available on the market, followed by a discussion of the challenges encountered when deploying P4 to program them and opportunities ahead.
Shir Landau-Feibish (Open University of Israel) gave the second keynote talk, “Time-Aware Network Telemetry in the Data Plane,” opening the afternoon session. The talk explored the concept of time-aware network telemetry and proposed several innovative paradigms for various telemetry tasks.
This year, we only accepted short papers of 6 pages and each presenter was invited to give an in-depth talk followed by 10-minutes of Q&As from the audience. The presenters were well prepared, and engagement with the audience made for some lively discussions, questions and valuable feedback.
Robin Wehner (OVGU Magdeburg, Germany) discussed an efficient edge router implementation that would enable the transition from the traditional Internet architecture to the new architecture proposal SCION. He discussed how SCION can be extended with in-band network telemetry and could support path-aware networking. Martim Francisco (University of Lisbon, Portugal) presented P4Chaskey, which implemented the Chaskey MAC algorithm on PISA Switches. This solution utilizes much less data plane resources and requires fewer pipeline passes than state-of-the-art MAC solutions. Mariano Scazzariello (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) showed a non-traditional approach for parking payloads on existing PISA switches. The proposed method can increase the throughput of network functions and improve the overall efficiency of NFV infrastructures. Finally, Aristide Tanyi-Jong Akem (IMDEA Networks Institute, Spain; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain) discussed how in-network machine learning can be integrated into a hardware-accelerated 5G UPF to enable high-speed network intrusion detection. He also demonstrated the proposed method on a realistic 5G testbed dataset.
The workshop was co-chaired by Amedeo Sapio (Amazon Web Services, USA) and Sándor Laki (ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary), with the help of the steering committee Fernando Ramos (University of Lisbon, Portugal) and Muhammad Shahbaz (Purdue University, USA). A warm thanks to AMD for the sponsorship support which helped to make this event possible.
More details about the event, including abstracts and presentations, can be accessed on the event web page.