Packet prediction for speculative cut-through switching

The amount of intelligent packet processing in an Ethernet switch continues to grow, in order to support of embedded applications such as network security, load balancing and quality of service assurance. This increased packet processing is contributing to greater per-packet latency through the switch. In addition, there is a growing interest in using Ethernet switches in low latency environments such as high-performance clusters, storage area networks and real-time media distribution. In this paper we propose Packet Prediction for Speculative Cut-through Switching (PPSCS), a novel approach to reducing the latency of modern Ethernet switches without sacrificing feature rich policybased forwarding enabled by deep packet inspection. PPSCS exploits the temporal nature of network communications to predict the flow classification of incoming packets and begin the speculative forwarding of packets before complex lookup operations are complete. Simulation studies using actual network traces ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ANCS
• Authors: Paul Congdon, Matthew Farrens, Prasant Mohapatra
• Keywords: ANCS 2008, Computer Networks, Ethernet Switches, Packet Prediction, Packet Processing