Event-Driven Approach for Flow-to-Core Mapping by NICs in Multicore Systems

In exploiting multiple cores for packet processing, steering incoming packets to the same core on which its application resides is important for the performance issue. One of the key components for this is flow-to-core mapping table, which is used by NIC to steer incoming packets to right cores. To acquire the information required for flow-to-core table, we propose an event-driven approach unlike existing technologies, which take per-packet-based approach and thus cause non-negligible overhead. In addition, exploiting standard Linux utility to manipulate flow-to-core table of NIC, we realize NIC-independent approach unlike existing technologies, which require specific NICs.