Offloading Packet Processing in a Combined Router/Server

Despite the performance limitation with minimum-sized packet processing, 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 an architecture to boost overall performance of the PC-based router by offloading packet processing tasks to the NIC. We introduce a fast path for packet forwarding based on caching of flow entries in on-board classification hardware on the NIC. We describe our design and present an experimental evaluation.