The impact of traffic aggregation on the memory performance of networking applications

Issue title: Embeded Processors and Systems: Architectural Issues and Solutions for Emerging Applications

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Verdú, Javier | García, Jorge | Nemirovsky, Mario | Valero, Mateo

Affiliations: Departament de Arquitectura de Computadors, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Jordi Girona 1-3, Edifici D-6, Campus Nord, 08034 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: {jorge,mateo}@ac.upc.edu | Consentry Networks Inc. 1690 McCandless Drive, Milpitas, CA 95035, USA. E-mail: mario@consentry.com

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: jverdu@ac.upc.edu

Abstract: The trend of the networking processing is to increase the intelligence of the routers (i.e. security capacities). This means that there is an increment in the workload generated per packet and new types of applications are emerging, such as stateful programs. On the other hand, Internet traffic continues to grow vigorously. This fact involves an increment of the traffic aggregation levels and overloades the processing capacities of the routers. In this paper we show the importance of traffic aggregation level on networking application studies. We also classify the applications according to the data management of the packet processing. Hence, we present the different impacts on the data cache performance depending on the application category. Our results show that traffic aggregation level may affect the cache performance depending on the networking application category. Stateful applications show a significant sensitivity to this impact.

Keywords: Traffic, aggregation, stateless, stateful, flows

Journal: Journal of Embedded Computing, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 77-82, 2006