114 research outputs found
Study on the Performance of TCP over 10Gbps High Speed Networks
Internet traffic is expected to grow phenomenally over the next five to ten years. To cope with such large traffic volumes, high-speed networks are expected to scale to capacities of terabits-per-second and beyond. Increasing the role of optics for packet forwarding and transmission inside the high-speed networks seems to be the most promising way to accomplish this capacity scaling. Unfortunately, unlike electronic memory, it remains a formidable challenge to build even a few dozen packets of integrated all-optical buffers. On the other hand, many high-speed networks depend on the TCP/IP protocol for reliability which is typically implemented in software and is sensitive to buffer size. For example, TCP requires a buffer size of bandwidth delay product in switches/routers to maintain nearly 100\% link utilization. Otherwise, the performance will be much downgraded. But such large buffer will challenge hardware design and power consumption, and will generate queuing delay and jitter which again cause problems. Therefore, improve TCP performance over tiny buffered high-speed networks is a top priority. This dissertation studies the TCP performance in 10Gbps high-speed networks. First, a 10Gbps reconfigurable optical networking testbed is developed as a research environment. Second, a 10Gbps traffic sniffing tool is developed for measuring and analyzing TCP performance. New expressions for evaluating TCP loss synchronization are presented by carefully examining the congestion events of TCP. Based on observation, two basic reasons that cause performance problems are studied. We find that minimize TCP loss synchronization and reduce flow burstiness impact are critical keys to improve TCP performance in tiny buffered networks. Finally, we present a new TCP protocol called Multi-Channel TCP and a new congestion control algorithm called Desynchronized Multi-Channel TCP (DMCTCP). Our algorithm implementation takes advantage of a potential parallelism from the Multi-Path TCP in Linux. Over an emulated 10Gbps network ruled by routers with only a few dozen packets of buffers, our experimental results confirm that bottleneck link utilization can be much better improved by DMCTCP than by many other TCP variants. Our study is a new step towards the deployment of optical packet switching/routing networks
Enabling Shared Memory Communication in Networks of MPSoCs
Ongoing transistor scaling and the growing complexity of embedded system designs has led to the rise of MPSoCs (MultiāProcessor SystemāonāChip), combining multiple hardācore CPUs and accelerators (FPGA, GPU) on the same physical die. These devices are of great interest to the supercomputing community, who are increasingly reliant on heterogeneity to achieve power and performance goals in these closing stages of the race to exascale. In this paper, we present a network interface architecture and networking infrastructure, designed to sit inside the FPGA fabric of a cuttingāedge MPSoC device, enabling networks of these devices to communicate within both a distributed and shared memory context, with reduced need for costly software networking system calls. We will present our implementation and prototype system and discuss the main design decisions relevant to the use of the Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+, a stateāofātheāart MPSoC, and the challenges to be overcome given the device's limitations and constraints. We demonstrate the working prototype system connecting two MPSoCs, with communication between processor and remote memory region and accelerator. We then discuss the limitations of the current implementation and highlight areas of improvement to make this solution productionāready
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Securing Network Processors with Hardware Monitors
As an essential part of modern society, the Internet has fundamentally changed our lives during the last decade. Novel applications and technologies, such as online shopping, social networking, cloud computing, mobile networking, etc, have sprung up at an astonishing pace. These technologies not only influence modern life styles but also impact Internet infrastructure. Numerous new network applications and services require better programmability and flexibility for network devices, such as routers and switches. Since traditional fixed function network routers based on application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) have difficulty keeping pace with the growing demands of next-generation Internet applications, there is an ongoing shift in the industry toward implementing network devices using programmable network processors (NPs).
While network processors offer great benefits in terms of flexibility, their reprogrammable nature exposes potential security risks. Similar to network end-systems, such as general-purpose computers, software-based network processors have security vulnerabilities that can be attacked remotely. Recent research has shown that a new type of data plane attack is able to modify the functionality of a network processor and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) attack by sending a single malformed UDP packet. Since this attack relies solely on data plane access and does not need access to the control plane, it can be particularly difficult to control.
Hardware security monitors have been introduced to identify and eliminate these malicious packets before they can propagate and cause devastating effects in the network. However, previous work on hardware monitors only focus on single core systems with static (or very slowly changing) workloads. In network processors that use up to hundreds of parallel processor cores and have processing workloads that can change dynamically based on the network traffic, the realization of a complete multicore hardware monitoring system remains a critical challenge. Our research work in this thesis provides a comprehensive solution to this problem.
Our first contribution is the design and prototype implementation of a Scalable Hardware Monitoring Grid (SHMG). This scalable architecture balances area cost and performance overhead by using a clustered approach for multicore NP systems. In order to adapt to dynamically changing network traffic, a resource reallocation algorithm is designed to reassign the processing resources in SHMG to different network applications at runtime. An evaluation of the prototype SHMG on an Altera DE4 board demonstrates low resource and performance overheads. The functionality and performance of a runtime resource reallocation algorithm are tested using a simulation environment.
A second significant contribution of this work is a network system-level security solution for multicore network processors with hardware monitors. It addresses two key problems: (1) how to securely manage and reprogram processor cores and monitors in a deployed router in the network, and (2) how to prevent the large number of identical router devices in the network from an attack that can circumvent one specific monitoring system and lead to Internet-scale failures. A Secure Dynamic Multicore Hardware Monitoring System (SDMMon) is designed based on cryptographic principles and suitable key management to ensure the secure installation of processor binaries and monitor graphs. We present a Merkle tree based parameterizable high performance hash function that can be configured to perform a variety of functions in different devices via a 32-bit configuration parameter. A prototype system composed of both the SDMMon and the parameterizable hash is implemented and evaluated on an Altera DE4 board.
Finally, a fully-functional, comprehensive Multicore NP Security Platform, which integrates both the SHMG and the SDMMon security features, has been implemented on an Altera DE5 board
NetFPGA: status, uses, developments, challenges, and evaluation
The constant growth of the Internet, driven by the demand for timely access to data center networks; has meant
that the technological platforms necessary to achieve this purpose are outside the current budgets. In this order to make and
validate relevant, timely and relevant contributions; it is necessary that a wider community, access to evaluation,
experimentation and demonstration environments with specifications that can be compared with existing networking
solutions. This article introduces the NetFPGA, which is a platform to develop network hardware for reconfigurable and
rapid prototyping. Itās introduces the application areas in high-performance networks, advantages for traffic analysis,
packet flow, hardware acceleration, power consumption and parallel processing in real time. Likewise, it presents the
advantages of the platform for research, education, innovation, and future trends of this platform. Finally, we present a
performance evaluation of the tool called OSNT (Open-Source Network Tester) and shows that OSNT has 95% accuracy
of timestamp with resolution of 10ns for the generation of TCP traffic, and 90% efficiency capturing packets at 10Gbps of
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Techniques for Processing TCP/IP Flow Content in Network Switches at Gigabit Line Rates
The growth of the Internet has enabled it to become a critical component used by businesses, governments and individuals. While most of the trafļ¬c on the Internet is legitimate, a proportion of the trafļ¬c includes worms, computer viruses, network intrusions, computer espionage, security breaches and illegal behavior. This rogue trafļ¬c causes computer and network outages, reduces network throughput, and costs governments and companies billions of dollars each year. This dissertation investigates the problems associated with TCP stream processing in high-speed networks. It describes an architecture that simpliļ¬es the processing of TCP data streams in these environments and presents a hardware circuit capable of TCP stream processing on multi-gigabit networks for millions of simultaneous network connections. Live Internet trafļ¬c is analyzed using this new TCP processing circuit
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