Hardware accelerated software packet processing

Software routing promises to offer more adaptive and easily programmable network nodes. Until now, however, it has been considered too inefficient for production environments in terms of both performance and cost. Several recent studies have shown that software routers are now capable of scaling up to the high-performance routing tasks even with commodity personal computer (PC) hardware. Network processors provide many of the same advantages as PC hardware including the ability of running selected custom software. In addition to this, they also provide hardware-accelerated circuits for packet processing related tasks. This thesis explores the possibility of running a modified PC software router on a network processing unit (NPU). The focus was to study if this approach provides any advantage over traditional off-the-shelf PC hardware with a comparable price point. This has been researched by modifying an open source routing application Click to run efficiently on Cavium Octeon network processors. The modified Click version avoids the bottlenecks, which traditionally hinder the performance of software routers. It utilizes Octeon hardware units to accelerate various packet processing tasks. The implementation also supports multithreading on Octeon processors, which greatly increases the performance. With the implemented modifications, a very high raw packet forwarding rate was achieved compared to the standard Click running on the same hardware. The performance numbers were comparable to similar class PC hardware while the power consumption of the Octeon devices was approximately one-fourth of the PC hardware's consumption