Thread Queue Status Monitoring Technology For Multi-threaded Packet Dispatching

With the rapid development of the general multi-core processor performance, implementing data plane processing of network equipments based on the general multi-core CPU has become a trend. For example, Intel and other companies have launched related solutions. Futhermore, with the help of programmable hardware, general multi-core processing platform boost the performance by improving the packet I/O capabilities and offloading some software functions originally implemented by underlying driver, such as packet buffer management, into hardware.The network traffic is mainly processed by the multiple parallel hardware threads in the general multi-core processor.The dispatching of the packets to the threads is important to the performance of the processing platform. However, thread queue status is difficult to obtain, which is curcial to the dispatching for load balancing. This paper proposed a queue state estimation method by monitoring packet arrival and departure rate of each thread queue, which can effectively support load balancing d uring the packet dispatching process. The main research and innovations is as following:(1) A dispatch model called PacketFTD is proposed for multi- threaded data plane packet processing, based on the novel network processor architecture previously present by our research group. Detailed analyses of PacketFTD’s processing on arriving packets have been introduced. Based on the analysis, the packets enqueue rate monitoring and thread status monitoring is indicated to be the core technology of PacketFTD.(2) A distribution strategy of FTD is designed and a three-color status thread queue assessing algorithm(TCSAP) is proposed based on FTD for queue state monitoring. The key modules of PacketFTD have been designed based on TCSAP.(3)PacketFTD has been implemented based on FPGA, and a performance estimation environment is established by utilizing Modelsim to verify the core functions in PacketFTD. Performance analysis results show that the proposed multi-thread packet dispatch monitoring technology can achieve ac curate measurement on the input network traffic, and supports the implementation of the PacketFTD packet dispatch mechanism.The proposed PacketFTD model and TCSAP method is proved to support the load balancing among multiple hardware threads during the packets distribution procedure. The precise measurement modules can effectively measure packet arrival rate for each thread queue whichcan effectively support the implementation of FTD and has significant application value for network processing platform design based on commodity multi-core processors.