Towards high-performance packet processing on commodity multi-cores: current issues and future directions

Abstract

The demands of programmability have become more and more exigent as novel network services appear, such as E-commerce, social softwares, and online videos. Commodity multi-core CPUs have been widely applied in network packet processing to get high programmability and reduce the time-to-market. However, there is a great gap between the packet processing performance of commodity multi-core and that of the traditional packet processing hardware, e.g., NP (Network Process). Recently, optimization of the packet processing performance of commodity multi-cores has become a hot topic in industry and academia. In this paper, based on a detailed analysis of the packet processing procedure, firstly we identify two dominating overheads, namely the virtual-to-physical address translation and the packet buffer management. Secondly, we make a comprehensive survey on the current optimization methods. Thirdly, based on the survey, the heterogeneous architecture of the commodity multi-core + FPGA is proposed as a promising way to improve the packet processing performance. Fourthly, a novel Self-Described Buffer (SDB) management technology is introduced to eliminate the overheads of the allocation and deallocation of the packet buffers offloaded to FPGA. Then, an evaluation testbed, named PIOT (Packet I/O Testbed), is designed and implemented to evaluate the packet forwarding performance. I/O capacity of different commodity multi-core CPUs and the performance of optimization methods are assessed and compared based on PIOT. At last, the future work of packet processing optimization on multi-core CPUs is discussed.

FAS: Using FPGA to Accelerate and Secure SDN Software Switches

“…It consumes majority of CPU cycles in the procedure of packet I/O. Previously, our research group has proposed Self-Described Buffer (SDB) management in hardware to eliminate the packet buffer management expenditure in software [23]. In SDB, the original separated data structure Skb-packet and its metadata-is merged into a successive stored packet buffer (we call it the SDB packet buffer).…”