Speeding Up IP Lookup Procedure in Software Routers by Means of Parallelization

Abstract

Performance of software routers is limited by the speed of the operating system network protocol stack. A faster network protocol stack can be implemented in user space by utilizing parallelization and different optimization techniques. In this work we demonstrate an efficient implementation of the IP lookup algorithm in user space with multibit trie structures. Afterwards, we demonstrate the improvements achieved through parallelization. We evaluate pthreads and OpenMP parallelization methods and compare their performance.

Keywords

• 10 GbE
• high speed packet I/O
• IP lookup
• parallelization
• software routers