PacketUsher: A DPDK-based packet I/O engine for commodity PC

Deploying network applications on commodity PC is increasingly important because of its flexibility and cheapness. Due to high packet I/O overheads, the performance of these applications are low. In this paper, we present PacketUsher, an efficient packet I/O engine based on the libraries of DPDK. By replacing standard I/O routine with PacketUsher, we can remarkably accelerate both I/O-intensive and compute-intensive applications on commodity PC. As a case study of I/O-intensive application, our RFC 2544 benchmark over PacketUsher achieves same testing results as dedicated commercial device. For compute-intensive application, the performance of our application-layer traffic generator over PacketUsher is more than 4 times of the original value and outperforms existing frameworks by about 3 times.

[1]  Luigi Rizzo,et al.  netmap: A Novel Framework for Fast Packet I/O , 2012, USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

[2]  Katerina J. Argyraki,et al.  RouteBricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers , 2009, SOSP '09.

[3]  Martín Casado,et al.  Extending Networking into the Virtualization Layer , 2009, HotNets.

[4]  EDDIE KOHLER,et al.  The click modular router , 2000, TOCS.

[5]  L. Deri.  Improving Passive Packet Capture : Beyond Device Polling , 2003 .

[6]  Gergely Pongrácz,et al.  Removing Roadblocks from SDN: OpenFlow Software Switch Performance on Intel DPDK , 2013, 2013 Second European Workshop on Software Defined Networks.

[7]  K. K. Ramakrishnan,et al.  Eliminating receive livelock in an interrupt-driven kernel , 1996, TOCS.

[8]  Amin Vahdat,et al.  Realistic and responsive network traffic generation , 2006, SIGCOMM 2006.

[9]  KyoungSoo Park,et al.  PacketShader: Massively Parallel Packet Processing with GPUs to Accelerate Software Routers , 2010, NSDI 2010.

[10]  Stefano Giordano,et al.  Design of a High Performance Traffic Generator on Network Processor , 2008, 2008 11th EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design Architectures, Methods and Tools.

[11]  Glen Gibb,et al.  A Packet Generator on the NetFPGA Platform , 2009, 2009 17th IEEE Symposium on Field Programmable Custom Computing Machines.

[12]  Martín Casado,et al.  Fabric: a retrospective on evolving SDN , 2012, HotSDN '12.

[13]  Luigi Rizzo,et al.  Transparent acceleration of software packet forwarding using netmap , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.