OpenFlow in the Small: A Flexible and Efficient Network Acceleration Framework for Multi-Core Systems

Multi-core processors optimized for networking applications typically combine general-purpose cores with offloading engines to relieve the processor cores of specialized packet processing tasks, such as parsing, classification, and security. Unfortunately, modern embedded operating systems still lack an effective and advanced hardware abstraction to exploit these aspects optimally. Based on these considerations, this paper proposes a novel framework, OpenFlow in the Small (OFiS), specifically designed to provide a flexible hardware abstraction layer for heterogeneous multi-core systems with advanced hardware accelerators for network offloading. OFiS represents such accelerators as standard OpenFlow switches inside the processor, moving the edge of the OpenFlow network management to the computational resources inside the end-boxes. As indicated in the experimental evaluation, OFiS exploits hardware parallelism and consolidates the software tasks at finer granularities.