DPDK-based implementation of application-tailored networks on end user nodes

Abstract

Application-tailored networks are customized networks optimized for application requirements. They use custom protocol stacks and network virtualization to provide flexible and efficient communication. End user nodes run a framework called NENA to connect to such networks at runtime. The current NENA implementation runs on top of the operating system's network stack and uses the Socket API. It allows to show the flexibility of application-tailored networks but limits NENA's performance. Packet I/O frameworks like Intel's Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) offer direct access to network interfaces and high performance. So, such a packet I/O framework provides an opportunity to enhance NENA and investigate its performance. In this paper, we present a new implementation of NENA with Intel's Data Plane Development Kit and evaluate its performance. Experiments show that our approach can achieve more than 9 times higher packet rates than a Socket-based implementation and is able to saturate a 10 Gbit/s link using two CPU cores.