Improving performance in a combined router/server

A modern PC-based router can provide as competitive service as a specialized hardware router while offering more flexibility and possibility to extend beyond routing. We focus on a use case in which the PC-based router also functions as a server. In this paper, we propose a multi-core based architecture for a combined router/server that efficiently provides simultaneous packet forwarding and server processing. We improve the overall performance by creating a fast path for packet forwarding through caching flow entries in on-board classification hardware on the NIC. We propose a generic design based on multi-core processors and multi-queue network interface cards. We describe a prototype implementation and present an experimental evaluation of this design. We also devise a strategy for how to efficiently map packet forwarding and application processing tasks onto the multi-core architecture.