Demostration of Self-Described Buffer for Accelerating Packet Forwarding on Multi-core Servers

Network processing platform based on the multi-core CPU becomes more and more prevailing in nowadays. Buffer allocation/deallocation operations consume a large number of CPU cycles in packet I/O process. The problem becomes even worse in the scenario of packet forwarding, as buffer allocation/deallocation operations are more frequent than the host-based network applications. We thus propose a novel data structure for packet buffer management on multi-cores, named Self-Described Buffer (SDB), which merges the separated descriptor and metadata into packet buffer. SDB management overhead can be greatly reduced by utilizing the compact data structure, and zero-overhead buffer management can be further achieved by offloading SDB allocation/deallocation operations to NIC. We have prototyped SDB enabled NIC, named BcNIC, on NetFPGA-10G. In the demo, we will illustrate the advantages of the SDB scheme by comparing the performance of BcNIC with the traditional NIC on multi-core platforms.