Towards high-performance flow-level packet processing on multi-core network processors

  • Authors:
  • Yaxuan Qi;Bo Xu;Fei He;Baohua Yang;Jianming Yu;Jun Li

  • Affiliations:
  • Tsinghua University & Tsinghua National Lab for Information Science and Technology;Tsinghua University;Tsinghua University;Tsinghua University;Tsinghua University;Tsinghua University & Tsinghua National Lab for Information Science and Technology

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architecture for networking and communications systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

There is a growing interest in designing high-performance network devices to perform packet processing at flow level. Applications such as stateful access control, deep inspection and flow-based load balancing all require efficient flow-level packet processing. In this paper, we present a design of high-performance flow-level packet processing system based on multi-core network processors. Main contribution of this paper includes: a) A high performance flow classification algorithm optimized for network processors; b) An efficient flow state management scheme leveraging memory hierarchy to support large number of concurrent flows; c) Two hardware-optimized order-preserving strategies that preserve internal and external per-flow packet order. Experimental results show that: a) The proposed flow classification algorithm, AggreCuts, outperforms the well-known HiCuts algorithm in terms of classification rate and memory usage; b) The presented SigHash scheme can manage over 10M concurrent flow states on the Intel IXP2850 NP with extremely low collision rate; c) The performance of internal packet order-preserving scheme using SRAM queue-array is about 70% of that of external packet order-preserving scheme realized by ordered-thread execution.