Multi-core implementation of decomposition-based packet classification algorithms

摘要

Multi-field packet classification is a network kernel function where packets are classified based on a set of predefined rules. Decomposition-based classification approaches are of major interest to the research community because of the parallel search in each packet header field. This paper presents four decomposition-based approaches on multi-core processors. We search in parallel for all the fields using linear search or range-tree search; we store the partial results in a linked list or a bit vector. The partial results are merged to produce the final packet header match. We evaluate the performance with respect to latency and throughput varying the rule set size (1-64 K). Experimental results show that our approaches can achieve 128 ns latency per packet and 11.5 Gbps throughput on state-of-the-art 16-core platforms.