Switch bypass: End-host cloud networking revisited

IF 4.6 2区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, HARDWARE & ARCHITECTURE

Computer Networks Pub Date : 2025-10-13 DOI:10.1016/j.comnet.2025.111725

Antonio Le Caldare , Luigi Leonardi , Sebastiano Miano , Gregorio Procissi , Gianni Antichi , Giuseppe Lettieri

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Virtual switches are one of the most important building blocks in public cloud network stacks as they apply high-level policies to traffic enabling communication between virtual machines (VMs) and the rest of the world. The problem is that virtual switches need CPU cores to process packets and the more cores assigned to them, the less are available to VMs that are rented to customers and hence generate revenue.

With this paper, we show that it is potentially possible to find a sweet-spot between performance and costs. The insight is that applications running on VMs are not always using 100 % of their CPU processing power: we use this to design switch bypass, a new technique that allow virtual switches to opportunistically offload part of their processing to the virtual NIC drivers associated with guest VMs.

Using packet classification as use-case, we show that with switch bypass we obtain a performance boost up to 80 % without the need of additional core processing power.

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交换机旁路：重新访问终端主机云网络

虚拟交换机是公共云网络堆栈中最重要的构建块之一，因为它们将高级策略应用于支持虚拟机（vm）与世界其他地方之间通信的流量。问题是，虚拟交换机需要CPU内核来处理数据包，分配给它们的内核越多，出租给客户的虚拟机可用的内核就越少，从而产生收入。通过本文，我们展示了在性能和成本之间找到最佳平衡点的可能性。我们的见解是，在vm上运行的应用程序并不总是使用其CPU处理能力的100%：我们使用它来设计交换机旁路，这是一种新技术，允许虚拟交换机偶然地将其部分处理卸载到与来宾vm相关的虚拟网卡驱动程序。使用分组分类作为用例，我们表明，通过交换机旁路，我们可以在不需要额外核心处理能力的情况下获得高达80%的性能提升。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Computer Networks 工程技术-电信学

CiteScore

10.80

自引率

3.60%

发文量

434

审稿时长

8.6 months

期刊介绍： Computer Networks is an international, archival journal providing a publication vehicle for complete coverage of all topics of interest to those involved in the computer communications networking area. The audience includes researchers, managers and operators of networks as well as designers and implementors. The Editorial Board will consider any material for publication that is of interest to those groups.