Adaptive network-traffic balancing on multi-core software networking devices

Software networking devices running on commercial-off-the-shelf hardware offer more flexibility and less performance than high-end, dedicated, networking devices. However, this lack of performance can be compensated, to some extent, by multi-core processors that can manage network packets in parallel. In order to efficiently utilize multi-core architectures, the processing load and the network traffic must be properly balanced to optimize the inter-core communication. Here, we analyze the traffic distribution on a per-packet and per-flow basis and verify the performance of the Linux Bridge networking device. A new, adaptive, traffic-distribution method is proposed, which combines packet-based and flow-based traffic distributions. The method was experimentally validated by two test cases – the “worst-case” scenario, with one dominant flow, and the “backbone-link” scenario, with a large number of flows that have a similar packet rate. In the case of one dominant flow, the performance in traffic throughput is improved by a factor of 2.8 by engaging four processing cores. In the case of a large number of traffic flows, the performance remains similar to the existing flow-based methods.