Abstract
Equal load balancing for dispatching incoming packets to multiple threads is a crucial requirement in the stateful forwarding of multi-threaded software routers to achieve high-speed forwarding and low packet loss simultaneously. However, equal load balancing is not trivial for Named Data Networking (NDN) routers because of their stateful forwarding. In other words, the consistency of flow states should be maintained so that multiple threads do not access the states simultaneously. Sharding, wherein packets of the same flow are dispatched to the same thread while keeping loads of threads equal, has been proposed; however, in this study, we reveal that heavy hitters like popular content packets cause load imbalance, which may eventually cause packet losses. This study proposes a load balancing mechanism for NDN routers by exploiting the fact that states of flows need not be rigorously maintained when content packets are returned from caches at intermediate routers.
Highlights
Named Data Networking (NDN) [1] is a novel network architecture that provides useful in-network functionalities, such as caching [2] and stateful forwarding [3]
The experiments were performed on an NDN software router that we developed in our previous study [9]
The analysis here follows the model of the multi-threaded NDN router that we developed in our previous study [16]
Summary
Named Data Networking (NDN) [1] is a novel network architecture that provides useful in-network functionalities, such as caching [2] and stateful forwarding [3]. Because one thread is assumed to run on each CPU core, we, hereinafter, interchangeably use the words “CPU core” and “thread” interchangeably, and call an NDN software router an “NDN router” Despite their success, most studies do not consider how a Network Interface Card (NIC) dispatches incoming packets to threads. Sharding at the packet level does not cause load imbalance even if the skewness of content object popularity distributions is significant. The frontend cache is designed based on the observation that the root cause of such load imbalance is a small number of highly popular content objects (i.e., heavy hitters) [10], [13]. We propose a popularity-based packet dispatching scheme that spreads heavy hitters across threads while dispatching other packets according to sharding.
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