Current NFVs assign packets to CPU cores at flow granularity, where each flow is pinned to a single CPU. This approach is efficient under most scenarios but has exposed limitations when handling elephant flows. These “heavy hitters” overwhelm single cores, creating bottlenecks that affect overall throughput and degrade service quality. As networks scale to higher-speed links and core-rich CPUs, these imbalances become more severe. In this paper, we propose ParaFlowO, an architecture that Parallelizes processing elephant Flows across multiple CPU cores while preserving in-Order delivery. ParaFlowO breaks elephant flows into flowlets and dynamically rotates them across multiple cores. It integrates a lightweight reordering mechanism to preserve packet order and controls parallelism to mitigate contention on shared state. Preliminary evaluations show that ParaFlowO offers a practical solution to mixed-grained parallelism in stateful middleboxes.
Changgang Zheng, Bowen Yang, Jin Ke et al.· Asia-Pacific Workshop on Net...· 1 citation
The transition to Data Processing Unit (DPU)-centric architectures has become the de-facto standard in modern cloud networks, enabling infrastructure offload and improved host resource utilization. However, the fixed hardware limits of DPUs increasingly fail to keep pace with the rapid growth of host compute density and network-intensive workloads. As a result, when DPU resources are saturated, host compute capacity often remains underutilized due to insufficient network provisioning. This paper presents Spillway, a unified vSwitching fabric that decouples virtual switching capacity from static DPU hardware limits. Spillway introduces a DPU-host hybrid data plane that repurposes idle host CPU resources to process spillover traffic when the DPU becomes the bottleneck. Unlike traditional software switching, Spillway activates host-based forwarding selectively through a unified resource scheduler, incurring no overhead under normal operating conditions. To ensure production viability, Spillway enforces strict performance isolation across heterogeneous data planes. Experimental results from a large-scale deployment show that, under bursty traffic workloads, Spillway improves single-node connection processing capacity by up to 90% with negligible interference to co-located applications.
Xiaochong Jiang, Dian Fan, Yilong Lv et al.· Proceedings of the ACM SIGCO...· 0 citations