OpenFlow in the small

Multi-core processors for networking applications typically combine general-purpose cores with off-loading engines, to relieve processor cores of specialized packet processing tasks, such as parsing, classification, and security. Unfortunately, modern embedded operating systems still lack of an effective support and hardware abstraction for optimally exploiting the above mentioned aspects. Starting from these considerations, this paper proposes a novel framework, “OpenFlow in the Small” (OFiS), specifically designed to provide a flexible hardware abstraction for a wide set of heterogeneous multi-core processors with advanced network off-loading capabilities. The OFiS framework allows SW services/applications, or only the operating system, activating and customizing off-loading operations, and distributing them to processor cores on a per-flow basis.