Accelerating the Performance of Software Tunneling Using a Receive Offload-Aware Novel L4 Protocol

Ryota KAWASHIMA; Hiroshi MATSUO

doi:10.1587/transcom.E98.B.2180

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Accelerating the Performance of Software Tunneling Using a Receive Offload-Aware Novel L4 Protocol

Ryota KAWASHIMA, Hiroshi MATSUO

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An L2-in-L3 tunneling technology plays an important role in network virtualization based on the concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible LAN) and NVGRE (Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation) protocols are being widely used in public cloud datacenters. These protocols resolve traditional VLAN problems such as a limitation of the number of virtual networks, however, their network performances are low without dedicated hardware acceleration. Although STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling) achieves far better performance, it has pragmatic problems in that STT packets can be dropped by network middleboxes like stateful firewalls because of modified TCP header semantics. In this paper, we propose yet another layer 4 protocol (Segment-oriented Connection-less Protocol, SCLP) for existing tunneling protocols. Our previous study revealed that the high-performance of STT mainly comes from 2-level software packet pre-reassembly before decapsulation. The SCLP header is designed to take advantage of such processing without modifying existing protocol semantics. We implement a VXLAN over SCLP tunneling and evaluate its performance by comparing with the original VXLAN (over UDP), NVGRE, Geneve, and STT. The results show that the throughput of the proposed method was comparable to STT and almost 70% higher than that of other protocols.

Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications Vol.E98-B No.11 pp.2180-2189

Publication Date: 2015/11/01

Publicized

Online ISSN: 1745-1345

DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E98.B.2180

Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Network Systems for Virtualized Environment)

Category

Authors

Ryota KAWASHIMA
Nagoya Institute of Technology
Hiroshi MATSUO
Nagoya Institute of Technology

Keyword

Software-Defined Networking, network virtualization, Network Function Virtualization, datacenter networks

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Ryota KAWASHIMA, Hiroshi MATSUO, "Accelerating the Performance of Software Tunneling Using a Receive Offload-Aware Novel L4 Protocol" in IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications, vol. E98-B, no. 11, pp. 2180-2189, November 2015, doi: 10.1587/transcom.E98.B.2180.
Abstract: An L2-in-L3 tunneling technology plays an important role in network virtualization based on the concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible LAN) and NVGRE (Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation) protocols are being widely used in public cloud datacenters. These protocols resolve traditional VLAN problems such as a limitation of the number of virtual networks, however, their network performances are low without dedicated hardware acceleration. Although STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling) achieves far better performance, it has pragmatic problems in that STT packets can be dropped by network middleboxes like stateful firewalls because of modified TCP header semantics. In this paper, we propose yet another layer 4 protocol (Segment-oriented Connection-less Protocol, SCLP) for existing tunneling protocols. Our previous study revealed that the high-performance of STT mainly comes from 2-level software packet pre-reassembly before decapsulation. The SCLP header is designed to take advantage of such processing without modifying existing protocol semantics. We implement a VXLAN over SCLP tunneling and evaluate its performance by comparing with the original VXLAN (over UDP), NVGRE, Geneve, and STT. The results show that the throughput of the proposed method was comparable to STT and almost 70% higher than that of other protocols.
URL: https://globals.ieice.org/en_transactions/communications/10.1587/transcom.E98.B.2180/_p

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@ARTICLE{e98-b_11_2180,
author={Ryota KAWASHIMA, Hiroshi MATSUO, },
journal={IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications},
title={Accelerating the Performance of Software Tunneling Using a Receive Offload-Aware Novel L4 Protocol},
year={2015},
volume={E98-B},
number={11},
pages={2180-2189},
abstract={An L2-in-L3 tunneling technology plays an important role in network virtualization based on the concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible LAN) and NVGRE (Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation) protocols are being widely used in public cloud datacenters. These protocols resolve traditional VLAN problems such as a limitation of the number of virtual networks, however, their network performances are low without dedicated hardware acceleration. Although STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling) achieves far better performance, it has pragmatic problems in that STT packets can be dropped by network middleboxes like stateful firewalls because of modified TCP header semantics. In this paper, we propose yet another layer 4 protocol (Segment-oriented Connection-less Protocol, SCLP) for existing tunneling protocols. Our previous study revealed that the high-performance of STT mainly comes from 2-level software packet pre-reassembly before decapsulation. The SCLP header is designed to take advantage of such processing without modifying existing protocol semantics. We implement a VXLAN over SCLP tunneling and evaluate its performance by comparing with the original VXLAN (over UDP), NVGRE, Geneve, and STT. The results show that the throughput of the proposed method was comparable to STT and almost 70% higher than that of other protocols.},
keywords={},
doi={10.1587/transcom.E98.B.2180},
ISSN={1745-1345},
month={November},}

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TY - JOUR
TI - Accelerating the Performance of Software Tunneling Using a Receive Offload-Aware Novel L4 Protocol
T2 - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications
SP - 2180
EP - 2189
AU - Ryota KAWASHIMA
AU - Hiroshi MATSUO
PY - 2015
DO - 10.1587/transcom.E98.B.2180
JO - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications
SN - 1745-1345
VL - E98-B
IS - 11
JA - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications
Y1 - November 2015
AB - An L2-in-L3 tunneling technology plays an important role in network virtualization based on the concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible LAN) and NVGRE (Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation) protocols are being widely used in public cloud datacenters. These protocols resolve traditional VLAN problems such as a limitation of the number of virtual networks, however, their network performances are low without dedicated hardware acceleration. Although STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling) achieves far better performance, it has pragmatic problems in that STT packets can be dropped by network middleboxes like stateful firewalls because of modified TCP header semantics. In this paper, we propose yet another layer 4 protocol (Segment-oriented Connection-less Protocol, SCLP) for existing tunneling protocols. Our previous study revealed that the high-performance of STT mainly comes from 2-level software packet pre-reassembly before decapsulation. The SCLP header is designed to take advantage of such processing without modifying existing protocol semantics. We implement a VXLAN over SCLP tunneling and evaluate its performance by comparing with the original VXLAN (over UDP), NVGRE, Geneve, and STT. The results show that the throughput of the proposed method was comparable to STT and almost 70% higher than that of other protocols.
ER -