Improved parallelism and scheduling in multi-core software routers

Recent technological advances in commodity server architectures, with
multiple multi-core CPUs, integrated memory controllers, high-speed interconnects,
and enhanced network interface cards, provide substantial computational capacity,
and thus an attractive platform for packet forwarding. However, to exploit this available capacity, we need a suitable software platform that allows effective parallel
packet processing and resource management. In this paper, we at first introduce an
improved forwarding architecture for software routers that enhances parallelism by
exploiting hardware classification and multi-queue support, already available in recent commodity network interface cards. After evaluating the original scheduling algorithm of the widely-used Click modular router, we propose solutions for extending
this scheduler for improved fairness, throughput, and more precise resource management. To illustrate the potential benefits of our proposal, we implement and evaluate a few key elements of our overall design. Finally, we discuss how our improved
forwarding architecture and resource management might be applied in virtualized
software routers.