Multi-core implementation of decomposition-based packet classification algorithms

Shijie Zhou, Yun Rock Qu, Viktor K. Prasanna

Abstract: 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.