A resource efficient content inspection system for next generation Smart NICs

Abstract

The aggregate power consumption of the Internet is increasing at an alarming rate, due in part to the rapid increase in the number of connected edge devices such as desktop PCs. Despite being left idle 75% of the time, 90% of PCs have their power management features disabled. Consequently, much recent research has focused on reducing power consumption of Internet edge devices. One such method for reducing PC power consumption is by augmenting the Network Interface Card (NIC) with enhanced processing capabilities. These capabilities pave the way for green computing by allowing the PC to transition to a low-power sleep state while the NIC responds to network traffic on behalf of the PC -a technique known as power proxying. However, such a Smart-NIC (SNIC) requires specialized low-power, resource-constrained processing, and architectural features in order to realize such capabilities. In this paper, we present a NIC-based packet content inspection system for power proxying and network intrusion detection. We use a novel partitioned TCAM technique that results in 87% energy savings and a 62% lower energy-delay product than existing non-partitioned router-based techniques, thus making our technique highly suitable for SNIC-based deployment.

A Survey of Green Networking Research

“…Moreover, it has to be pointed out that although several works adopt the same evaluation technique, the performance of the different approaches can rarely be compared: consider for instance the case of trace-driven evaluatio, which has been used in [19], [25], [20], [21], [22], [29], [27] and where each approach has been tested using different inputs. Rather, in order for the relative merits of different approaches to be more easily and directly comparable, a standard set of benchmark workloads should be identified and agreed by the community.…”

Towards power consumption in optical networks: a cognitive prediction‐based technique

“…A different technique, known as interface proxying, tries to filter data packets so as to keep in long sleep periods either the network interface card (NIC) or an external device . Control packets are refined to prolong sleeping periods; attention is given to keep the normal network operation.…”

Energy saving in carrier-grade networks: A survey

“…NIC proxying implements a small handling to the incoming traffic: each NIC handles non-urgent traffic, while a whole node will wake up when urgent traffic requiring further computation is received. In [79], a framework is proposed to implant NIC proxying over existing hardware. It supports a line speed of up to 1 Gbit/s in its software implementation (on the Smart-NIC), and up to 10 Gbit/s in its hardware implementation.…”