Architectural impact of stateful networking applications

The explosive and robust growth of the Internet owes a lot to the ”end-to-end principle”, which pushes stateful operations to the end-points. The Internet grew both in traffic volume, and in the richness of the applications it supports. The growth also brought along new security issues and network monitoring applications. Edge devices, in particular, tend to perform upper layer packet processing. A whole new class of applications require stateful processing. In this paper we study the impact of stateful networking applications on architectural bottlenecks. The analysis covers applications with a variety of statefulness levels. The study emphasizes the data cache behaviour. Nevertheless, we also discuss other issues, such as branch prediction and ILP. Additionally, we analyze the architectural impact through the TCP connection life. Our results show an important memory bottleneck due to maintaining the states. Moreover, depending on the target of the application, the memory bottlen...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ANCS
• Authors: Javier Verdú, Jorge García-Vidal, Mario Nemirovsky, Mateo Valero
• Keywords: ANCS 2005, Memory Bottleneck, Stateful, Stateful Networking Applications