Paxos in the NIC: Hardware Acceleration of Distributed Consensus Protocols

Abstract

Modern network infrastructures rich of logically centralized agents, such as DHCP, AAA, SDN controller agents, need to use redundancy in order to guarantee high availability and consensus protocols to have strong consistency. Unfortunately, consensus protocols, which are traditionally deployed as application-layer services running on end-to-end servers, are often recognized as system performance bottlenecks. In this paper, we present a possible solution leveraging programmable network hardware in order to offer consensus as service for the application, thus reducing occupied server resources and accelerating the protocol with programmable hardware. This is obtained by defining a high-level abstraction for describing consensus protocols and conducting a feasibility study through the implementation of the Paxos protocol with a SmartNIC.