A new TCB cache to efficiently manage TCP sessions for web servers

TCP/IP, the most commonly used network protocol, consumes a significant portion of time in Internet servers. While a wide spectrum of studies has been done to reduce its processing overhead such as TOE and Direct Cache Access, most of them did studies solely from the per-packet perspective and concentrated on the packet memory access overhead. They ignored per-session data TCP Control Block (TCB), which poses a challenge in web servers with a large volume of concurrent sessions. In this paper, we start with challenge studies and show that the TCB data should be efficiently managed. We propose a new TCB cache addressed by session identifiers to address the challenge. We carefully design the TCB cache along two important axes: cache indexing and cache replacement policies. First, we study the performance of various hash functions and propose a new indexing scheme for the TCB cache by employing two Universal hash functions. We analyze session identifiers and choose some important bits as...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ANCS
• Authors: Guangdeng Liao, Laxmi N. Bhuyan, Wei Wu, Heeyeol Yu, Steve R. King
• Keywords: ANCS 2010, Cache, Computer Networks, Hash Functions, TCB Cache