  Supporting programmable states in the data plane of a forwarding element,
e.g., a switch or a NIC, has recently attracted the interest of the research
community, which is now looking for the right abstraction to enable the
programming of stateful network functions in hardware at line rate. We
challenge the conservative assumptions of state-of-the-art abstractions in this
field, e.g. always assuming minimum size packets arriving back-to-back. Using
trace-based simulations we show that by making more realistic assumptions on
the traffic characteristics, e.g. larger average packet size, we can relax the
design constraints that currently limit the set of functions that can be
implemented at line rate, allowing for more complex functions, with no harm for
performance.
