P4 Semantic Steering for Serverless Environments

Ismail, Layal and Pelle, István and Paolucci, Francesco and Sonkoly, Balázs and Cugini, Filippo (2026) P4 Semantic Steering for Serverless Environments. In: ICC 2026 - IEEE International Conference on Communications. Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Communications . IEEE, Piscataway (NJ), No. 11588239. ISBN 9798319542090

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Abstract

As recent developments have put semantic information in the spotlight, meaning-based communication becomes ever more attractive. In this paper, we take a first step toward our vision of a jointly controlled semantic-aware switching and compute fabric by combining P4 programmable steering and serverless computing. We present a low-latency router that can steer requests to Knative serverless functions by collecting and interpreting application-provided semantic tags from the traffic, node processing capabilities and telemetry on compute node resource usage. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our BMv2 software switch-based solution can achieve comparable performance to standard IP address-based steering implemented with P4 or leveraging the Linux kernel. Furthermore, we validate our implementation's steering and processing node CPU-utilization-based load balancing features using a representative object recognition application. © 2026 IEEE.

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