Improving TRILL Mesh Network's Throughput Using Smart NICs

Abstract

TRILL is a Layer 2 protocol which allows the establishment of a layer 2 mesh network while improving infrastructure utilization in comparison with Ethernet. Indeed, TRILL does not use STP and keeps all links active. It always uses the shortest path between any two nodes and can dispatch the flows following ECMP. However, the problem is that throughput wise the performances of TRILL are not on par with Ethernet. This is the consequence of the fact that Linux does not have a fast path solution for TRILL and, moreover, the fact that CPU and memory resources have to be used in order to process the frames. The goal of this paper is to propose a fast path solution for TRILL that is based on a smart NIC. We experimented with our solution and the results show that we successfully increased the throughput of TRILL by 100%, thus reaching the network interface limit of 10Gbps while reducing latency.