SIMD-Matcher: A SIMD-based Arbitrary Matching Framework

Abstract

Packet classification methods rely upon matching packet content/header against pre-defined rules, which are generated by network applications and their configurations. With the rapid development of network technology and the fast-growing network applications, users seek more enhanced, secure, and diverse network services. Hence it becomes critical to improve the performance of arbitrary matching operations. This paper presents SIMD-Matcher, an efficient Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) and cache-friendly arbitrary matching framework. To further improve the arbitrary matching performance, SIMD-Matcher adopts a trie node with a fixed high-fanout, and a varying span for each node depending on the data distribution. The trie node layout leverage cache and modern processor features such as SIMD instructions. To support arbitrary matching, we first interpret arbitrary rules into three fields: value, mask, and priority. Second, to support insertion of randomly positioned wildcards to arbitrary rules, we propose the SIMD-Matcher extraction algorithm to process the wildcard bits. Third, we add an array of wildcard entries to the leaf entries, which stores the wildcard rules and guarantees the correctness of matching result. Experiments show that SIMD-Matcher outperforms GenMatcher under large scale of rule set and key set, in terms of search time, insert time, and memory cost. Specifically with 5M rules, our method achieves a 2.7X speedup on search time, and the insertion time takes~ ∼ 7.3 seconds, gaining a 1.38X speedup; meanwhile the memory cost reduction is up to 6.17X.