Trading Packet Headers for Packet Processing

In high speed networks, packet processing is relatively expensive while bandwidth is cheap. This begs the question: what fields can be added to packets to make packet processing easier? By exploring this question, we devise a number of novel mechanisms to speed up packet processing. With the advent of new standards for the Data Link, Network, and Transport layers, we believe there is an opportunity to apply these techniques to improve the performance of real protocols. First, we suggest adding a data manipulation header to an easily accessible portion of each packet. This header contains pointers to fields (in various layers) required for data manipulation. This information allows implementations to efficiently combine data manipulation steps (e.g., encryption and copying) in a structured fashion. Second, we suggest adding index fields to protocol identifiers at all layers (e.g.,, connection identifiers, network addresses, DSAPs) to reduce lookup costs and generic protocol processing. ..