Network Intelligence Research Center (NIRC)

Sep 24, 2025 · Fundamentals

How to Build and Control a P4 Switch: A Practical Overview

This article introduces the P4 language and explains how a P4‑programmable switch is built, detailing its parser, ingress/egress pipelines, deparser, and the P4Runtime control interface, while highlighting the protocol‑independent, target‑independent, and high‑performance advantages for modern networks.