Traffic Redundancy Elimination over a Programmable Data Plane: Design and Implementation

Traffic redundancy elimination (TRE) is a key solution for saving networking resources by removing redundant traffic transfers in networks. However, current TRE systems mainly rely on end-side software programs at the cost of packet processing performance due to their complex computational requirements. This makes it difficult to deploy the TRE technique for various networking scenarios in practice. This study proposes TRE-PRO, a TRE system over a programmable data plane (PDP) paradigm. PDP provides flexible and high-performance packet processing that enables the implementation of on-path deployable and high-performance TRE systems. This article explores the design and implementation of TRE-PRO in the state-of-the-art programmable switch architecture. It is shown that TRE-PRO overcomes the shortcomings of existing TRE systems, such as packet processing delay. The performance evaluation results show that TRE-PRO can eliminate redundant traffic at the modern programmable switch without compromising any processing delay.