Design And Implementation Of Router Data-Forwarding Plane Based On Multi-Core Network Processor

With the rapid development of Internet, it brings great convenience to the social life. But the increasing of Internet users, network traffic and a wide variety of business has brought a lot of loads to the entire network. The router serves as a hub of the network. Its forwarding performance is faced with a great challenge. The traditional single core processor has been unable to meet the increasing needs of the user's business functions and performance. Improving the overall forwarding performance of the router by multi-core processors becomes a trend. In this thesis, we mainly researched the design of the data forwarding scheme for multi-core router system and the implementation of the driver software based on Cavium multi-core network processor.At first we introduced the basic knowledge of the router including work mechanism, structure and operating system running on it etc. Based on this, two kinds of data forwarding schemes based on the load balance mechanism and the priority strategy are proposed by us, which include the per-flow forwarding scheme and the per-packet forwarding scheme. The per-flow forwarding scheme is to classify the packets inputted into the system into different flows that have different priorities according to its types and features, and then dispatch them to the cores in the data plane through the hash algorithm to achieve load balance, and improve the performance of the system. Per-packet forwarding scheme is to attach the packets with different priorities according to their types and treat the packet as the scheduling unit, and then dispatch them to the cores in the data plane through the round robin algorithm, so that all the cores are kept at a high speed, so as to achieve load balance and improve system performance. These two kinds of forwarding schemes release the performance of multi-core processors greatly, especially the per-packet forwarding scheme can maximize the utilization of multi-core processors, and improve the performance of the system. In addition, we implemented the two kinds of data forwarding schemes on the Cavium CN78 xx multi-core network processor and tested the system of the router, including functional testing and performance testing and analysis of the testing results.Through the final test, the two kinds of forwarding schemes can make the multi-core router to provide higher system performance, lower system cost and strong data forwarding performance meeting the current needs of the user.