PacketUsher: A DPDK-based packet I/O engine for commodity PC

Zhijun Xu, Liang Zhou, Li Feng, Yujun Zhang, Jun Zhang, Huadong Ma

Abstract: Deploying network applications on commodity PC is increasingly important because of its flexibility and cheapness. Due to high packet I/O overheads, the performance of these applications are low. In this paper, we present PacketUsher, an efficient packet I/O engine based on the libraries of DPDK. By replacing standard I/O routine with PacketUsher, we can remarkably accelerate both I/O-intensive and compute-intensive applications on commodity PC. As a case study of I/O-intensive application, our RFC 2544 benchmark over PacketUsher achieves same testing results as dedicated commercial device. For compute-intensive application, the performance of our application-layer traffic generator over PacketUsher is more than 4 times of the original value and outperforms existing frameworks by about 3 times.