CORAL: A multi-core lock-free rate limiting framework

Rate limiting is a fundamental function for managing quality of network service. Unfortunately, the poor scalability of today's rate limiting approaches restricts the performance on multi-core platform. In this work, we present CORAL, a lock-free framework that effectively implements high performance rate limiting on multi-core platform. The key idea is that CORAL uses virtual class queues to isolate simultaneous access to the same queue by different CPU cores and two additional parameters to synchronize the QoS constraints among multi cores. Experimental results show that this lock-free design obtains around 50% higher limiting rate compared to existing locking method, and shows great scalability and stable performance over different number of cores and packet sizes.