IAPS: Decreasing Software-Based Packet Steering Overhead Through Interrupt Reduction

Abstract

Packet Steering is often performed in hardware, rendering the software-based packet steering mechanisms of the Linux kernel obsolete. However, the ability to redistribute packets later during network processing could help achieve a more parallelized network stack. Unfortunately, existing software-based packet steering schemes yield minimal performance gain at high communication costs. This paper proposes Interrupt Avoidance Packet Steering (IAPS), a novel packet steering scheme that reduces software-based packet steering overhead. IAPS decreases communication costs by avoiding hardware interrupt triggers during packet steering. IAPS increases application throughput by up to and the packet per hardware interrupt ratio by up to 4 x.

Younghoon Kim 김영훈

Associate Professor

My research interests include distributed systems, high-performance computing/networking and data-center-related technologies.