Towards a Flexible User-Space Architecture for High-Performance IEEE 802.11 Processing

Exploiting bandwidth potentials and managing complexity of current and future IEEE 802.11 networking standards becomes increasingly difficult when using today's operating system kernels and high-throughput wireless network interfaces due to overhead caused by interrupts and kernels of complex general-purpose operating systems. These problems can be tackled by employing special purpose forwarding planes deeply integrated with wireless drivers. To do so we propose a user-space implementation of drivers and Wi-Fi stack, built upon the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) from the wired world. This allows for scalable frame processing, as well as flexible and easy experimenting with new protocols and approaches (compared to kernel development). Our prototypic evaluation reveals that user-space processing of IEEE 802.11 frames can increase throughput and decrease delay of a wireless connection significantly, e.g., 100% more throughput for small frames and 27% less delay. We also point out common obstacles when adapting wireless drivers from kernel to user space and provide advice on how to overcome them. The code base is made publicly available.