An Effective Forwarding Architecture for SMP Linux Routers

Recent technological advances provide an excellent opportunity to achieve truly effective results in the field of open Internet devices based on PC COTS Hardware, also known as Open Routers. In this environment, new interesting research topics, like parallel computing optimization, are related to the rapid migration of CPU architectures to the multi-core paradigm. Thus, with this idea, this contribution focuses on the packet forwarding performance in SMP Linux kernels, trying to identify and to characterize its architectural bottlenecks. Starting from this analysis, the authors propose an innovative architecture to optimize the forwarding performance when multi-processor or multi-core systems are used.