A survey on accelerating technologies for fast network packet processing in Linux environments

Freitas, Eduardo; Filho, Assis T. de Oliveira; Carmo, Pedro Rafael X. do; Souza, Ricardo M. Campello de; Kelner, Judith

doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2022.10.003

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…If we take a look at the architecture of the Linux networking subsystem [9,30], parameter m measures the number of packets in the capturing queue. The packet capturing process in Linux starts when the first packet arrives to the NIC.…”

Section: Policy Based On a Threshold Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

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Optimality of a Network Monitoring Agent and Validation in a Real Probe

2023

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The evolution of commodity hardware makes it possible to use this type of equipment to implement traffic monitoring systems. A preliminary empirical evaluation of a network traffic probe based on Linux indicates that the system performance has significant losses as the network rate increases. To assess this issue, we consider a model with two tandem queues and a moving server. In this system, we formulate a three-dimensional Markov Decision Process in continuous time. The goal of the proposed model is to determine the position of the server in each time slot so as to optimize the system performance which is measured in terms of throughput. We first formulate an equivalent discrete-time Markov Decision Process and we propose a numerical method to characterize the solution of our problem in a general setting. The solution we obtain in this problem has been tested for a wide range of scenarios and, in all the instances, we observe that the optimality is close to a threshold type policy. We also consider a real probe and we validate the good performance of threshold policies in real applications.

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Section: Policy Based On a Threshold Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…We represent in Figure 1 the evolution of packets since entering the Linux end system [9] to their delivery to the monitoring application. This is achieved in three different stages:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimality of a Network Monitoring Agent and Validation in a Real Probe

2023

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“…Thus, these applications achieve their full potential only when executing either on specialized software stacks or on hardware accelerators, specialized hardware that implements basic functions such as computing (e.g., Graphics Processing Units, GPUs), storage (e.g., Non-Volatile Memory Express, NVMe), and networking (e.g., Smart Network Interface Cards, SmartNICs). The performance advantages offered by these acceleration options have increasingly pushed companies to prefer them to the standard, general-purpose cloud resources [12]- [14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 correlates the different growth rates of network and processors speed with the number of major research papers that use network acceleration technologies to speed-up typical data center services. As the gap between the two curves widens, the number of papers increases and stresses the urgency to find efficient ways to include high-performance networking within generalpurpose cloud infrastructures [14], [26]- [30].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As we further comment in Section III, they all achieve significantly higher throughput and lower latency than standard networking by following common design principles, such as zero-copy transfers, minimal context switching, and asynchronous processing. The main difference among these options is how they implement these principles, as they target different needs and yield to different benefits [14]. XDP provides in-kernel acceleration.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Empowering Cloud Computing With Network Acceleration: A Survey

Rosa,

Foschini,

Corradi

2024

IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials

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Modern interactive and data-intensive applications must operate under demanding time constraints, prompting a shift toward the adoption of specialized software and hardware network acceleration technologies. This specialization, however, poses significant scalability, flexibility, security, and economic sustainability challenges for application developers. Cloud computing holds the potential to overcome these obstacles by offering the cost-effective option to access specialized acceleration technologies through standard cloud interfaces. Nevertheless, that integration is still challenging for cloud providers. In the cloud, physical resources are hidden behind a virtualization layer, whereas acceleration technologies make applications directly interact with the hardware. To bridge this gap, recent literature explores the possibility of empowering cloud platforms with accelerated networking as a commodity, thus offering the innovative option of Network Acceleration as a Service. This survey reviews these recent research efforts by adopting popular technologies like XDP, DPDK, and RDMA as a reference. To organize the surveyed research in a comprehensive framework, we identify four key aspects that pose critical problems to the integration of acceleration options in cloud computing -access interfaces, virtualization techniques, serviceability, and security -and systematically discuss the associated challenges. Then, we present the issues to be further addressed and outline the most promising research directions for the full integration of network acceleration within next-generation cloud computing platforms.

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