Analyzing and scaling parallelism for network routing protocols

Abstract

The serial nature of legacy code in routing protocol implementations has inhibited a shift to multicore processing in the control plane, even though there is much inherent parallelism. In this paper, we investigate the use of multicore as the compute platform for routing applications using BGP, the ubiquitous protocol for routing in the Internet backbone, as a representative application. We develop a scalable multithreaded implementation for BGP and evaluate its performance on several multicore configurations using a fully configurable multicore simulation environment. We implement several optimizations at the software and architecture levels, achieving a speedup of 6.5 times over the sequential implementation, which translates to a throughput of ∼170K updates per second. Subsequently, we propose a generic architecture and parallelization methodology which can be applied to all routing protocol implementations to achieve significant performance improvement.