Performance Enhancement of Network Devices with Multi-Core Processors

In network based applications, packet capture is the main area that attracts many researchers in developing traffic monitoring systems. Along with the packet capture, many other functions such as security are incorporated in network applications. Specialized hardware and software have been developed and used in order to meet the real-time performance requirements for these functions. Recently, with the prevalence of multi-core processors, researchers are deploying multi-core processor based parallel processing approach to the multi-function network applications. However, parallelizing multiple operations of a network device in an integrated way is difficult because of asynchronous characteristics of coordinating these functions. In this paper, we propose a pipelined parallel execution approach using the producer-consumer model applicable to an environment where a stream of packets passes through two successive processes, each of which performs some tasks on packets. We also implement a packet capture process and an encryption process inside the parallel model, and show the effectiveness of our approach.