Aug 2026· Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication· pp. 1170-1184· 0 citations· 86 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
This paper presents Flow.zip, a backward-compatible header compression mechanism designed for existing data center networks that leverages a combination of last-hop network offload and MPLS support, both of which are ubiquitous in modern data center deployments.
Abstract
Packet header overhead is a persistent source of inefficiency in packet-switched networks, reducing goodput and increasing network load. Trends like tunneling further increase this overhead, significantly impacting flow completion times. While, in principle, it is possible to compress these headers, existing methods require specialized hardware on every hop to compress/decompress the packet to/from custom header formats. In this paper, we present Flow.zip, a backward-compatible header compression mechanism designed for existing data center networks. Our solution leverages a combination of last-hop network offload and MPLS support, both of which are ubiquitous in modern data center deployments. Flow.zip overcomes scalability limitations in these components by selectively and intelligently coordinating compression for a subset of flows. Doing so, Flow.zip achieves up to 58% reduction in average flow completion time on real-world data center workloads.
ParaFlowO is proposed, an architecture that Parallelizes processing elephant Flows across multiple CPU cores while preserving in-Order delivery and integrates a lightweight reordering mechanism to preserve packet order and controls parallelism to mitigate contention on shared state.
Chang-Gang Zheng, Bowen Yang, Jin Ke et al.· Asia-Pacific Workshop on Net...· 1 citation
Network bandwidth continues to scale rapidly, yet Internet data transmission performance remains constrained by the legacy 1500 B MTU. This small MTU translates high bandwidth into high packet rates that strain CPU processing at middleboxes and end hosts. While increasing the MTU could substantially improve performance, coordinating upgrades across arbitrary Internet paths is impractical. This paper presents PacketExpress, a packet processing architecture that enables networks to leverage large MTUs for Internet traffic without requiring modifications to neighboring networks. MTU-translating gateways at network borders dynamically aggregate incoming small packets into larger packets for efficient processing, then segment them back when forwarding externally. We present PXIO, a packet processing stack that leverages NIC offload capabilities to achieve high throughput. We introduce F-PMTUD, which determines the path MTU within a single round-trip time without relying on ICMP. For UDP, we present PX-caravan, a tunneling mechanism that encapsulates multiple packets to benefit from large MTUs while preserving packet boundaries. Our prototype achieves 1.47 Tbps throughput with 8 CPU cores while converting over 90% of 1500 B packets into 9000 B packets, improving middlebox performance by up to 5.1× and end-host performance by up to 2.5×.
Junghan Yoon, Youngmin Choi, Juyoung Park et al.· Conference on Applications,...· 0 citations
Cloud-native microservices architectures rely on network namespaces for isolation, with the overhead of container communications remaining a critical performance bottleneck. While colocating containers on the same host mitigates some of this overhead, it cannot match the performance of communication within a single network namespace. Existing solutions either require application rewrites or fail to support the full Linux network stack expected by containerized applications. In this paper, we present netkit, an eBPF-based datapath that specializes the Linux networking stack to eliminate redundant backlog queue traversals during network namespace transitions. netkit leverages eBPF to transparently redirect packets between namespaces, bypassing unnecessary buffering while preserving compatibility with existing container applications. Our implementation in the Linux kernel, integrated with minimal changes to the Cilium network plugin for Kubernetes, improves throughput by up to 37% and achieves parity between container-to-container and process-to-process communications, effectively closing the performance gap introduced by namespace isolation.
