A Survey on Mechanisms for Fast Network Packet Processing

Abstract

As the Internet of Things becoming widely used, the requirement for high performance network is growing rapidly. Network performance is affected by data transmission based on physical link and packet processing handled by operating system. With the development of network hardware technology and wireless communication technology, network data transmission rate has been further improved, but the packet processing performance based on operating system cannot match it. There are several performance bottlenecks in the traditional packet processing, correspondingly there are various optimization mechanisms to solve these problems and further improve the performance. This paper analyzes some mainstream optimization mechanisms of packet processing based on software. Firstly, we analyze the architecture design of these mechanisms and the workflow when receiving packets. Then we compare the technical methods adopted by each mechanism and problems solved by each mechanism. Finally, we compare the application scenarios and the shortcomings of each mechanism.