University of Campinas – P4 Programmable Patch Panel (P7)

Open-source hardware-based emulation testbed.​

• High performance (100G ports & Tbps capacity)​
• Simple and user-friendly (Mininet-like UX)
• High-fidelity emulation of network topologies
• Rich link characteristics (e.g., bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss, background traffic)
• P7 autogenerates all the necessary files (e.g., P4 code, tables information, chassis configuration)​
• User/experimenter can connect physical servers to inject custom traffic flows and P4 devices for extended network programmability.​​

P7 contributes to the ecosystem of affordable 100G experimental platforms with a user-friendly, cost-effective 100G network emulator in support of traditional networking and advanced programmable networking research, as well as teaching purposes. Being a programmable high-fidelity testbed, P7 facilitates repeatable and reproducible research by sharing P7 topology files to be compiled and deployed, resulting in the same output anywhere (along with the specific Tofino target capabilities permit).

P7 has been demonstrated and received an award in the P4 Workshop 2022 and SIGCOMM 2022. P7 is currently being deployed in the OpenRAN@Brasil disaggregated testbed.

P7 project was supported by and in technical collaboration with the Brazilian National Research and Education Network (RNP – Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa) (https://www.rnp.br/en).

Open source repository.