SwitchBlade: A Platform for Rapid Deployment of Network Protocols on Programmable Hardware

The authors present SwitchBlade, a platform for rapidly deploying custom protocols on programmable hardware. SwitchBlade uses a pipeline-based design that allows individual hardware modules to be enabled or disabled on the y, integrates software exception handling, and provides support for forwarding based on custom header fields. SwitchBlade's ease of programmability and wire-speed performance enables rapid prototyping of custom data-plane functions that can be directly deployed in a production network. SwitchBlade integrates common packet-processing functions as hardware modules, enabling different protocols to use these functions without having to resynthesize hardware.