High performance Sockets over kernel level virtual interface architecture

The Sockets application programming interface is the de facto standard in network programming. Sockets emulation over high performance networks has being pursued by many researchers. Most projects in this area favor user level communication, but this approach has resulted in some compatibility problems. In this paper, after the reexamination of the tradeoff between user level and kernel level communication, the design and implementation of Sockvia are discussed which is a kernel level Sockets emulation system based on virtual interface architecture. Sockvia emulates Sockets streaming semantics and achieves full compatibility with Sockets over TCP/IP. Through performance optimization methods such as lightweight flow control and private buffer, the performance of Sockvia is very attractive compared with that of Sockets over GM-IP or SGM. The half round-trip latency of Sockvia is below 12 us and the peak bandwidth is over 240 MBytes. The results of real-world application tests are also presented.