Accelerating Packet Processing in a Xen Environment with OpenDataPlane

Over recent years, packet processing acceleration has become a hot topic. Indeed, several software solutions have been developed to offer the best possible performance. Recently, a new open source project has started called OpenDataPlane (ODP), this framework provides a set of APIs, configuration files, and other functions to accelerate packet processing and manage effectively the networking data plane. In this paper, we present our new Xen architecture, implemented within Metamorphic Networks "MNet" platform that integrates ODP in a privileged domain, called driver domain. This architecture allows us to associate ODP with virtual CPU cores in order to accelerate packet processing and improve the performance of our platform, without adding overhead in physical processors. The results of our experiments show that our new architecture improves packet processing performance by 15%, only using the virtual CPU resources.