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

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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ANCS
• Authors: Yaxuan Qi, Bo Xu, Fei He, Baohua Yang, Jianming Yu, Jun Li
• Keywords: ANCS 2007, Computer Networks, Flow Classification Algorithm, Flow-level Packet Processing, Packet Processing