kP2PADM: An In-kernel Gateway Architecture for Managing P2P Traffic

This work presents an in-kernel gateway architecture on Linux, namely kP2PADM, for managing P2P traffic on dynamic ports. This design can effectively eliminate redundant data passing between the kernel space and the user space. The management functions include: (1) classifying and filtering P2P traffic, (2) scanning viruses on shared files, (3) auditing chatting messages and transferred files, and (4) bandwidth control. Practical implementation issues and techniques in the system design are discussed herein. This design proposes a dual-queue architecture to handle packet reassembly and resolve head-of-line blocking. A connection cache accelerates handling the reconnection requests from the peers. The throughput can achieve up to 185.73 Mbps even with content filtering, and remains around 79.09 Mbps when virus scanning is enabled. The impacts of each management function and out-of-order packets on performance are also analyzed through the internal benchmarks.