2019/04/01 by Oliver Hohlfeld, Helge Reelfs, Hohlfeld, Oliver +11
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.00671
Technical Report, RWTH Aachen University, Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems
arxiv created 2019/04/01 · openalex publication_date 2019/04/01 · arxiv updated 2019/04/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As network speed increases, servers struggle to serve all requests directed at them. This challenge is rooted in a partitioned data path where the split between the kernel space networking stack and user space applications induces overheads. To address this challenge, we propose Santa, a new architecture to optimize the data path by enabling server applications to partially offload packet processing to a generic rule processor. We exemplify Santa by showing how it can drastically accelerate kernel-based packet processing - a currently neglected domain. Our evaluation of a broad class of applications, namely DNS, Memcached, and HTTP, highlights that Santa can substantially improve the server performance by a factor of 5.5, 2.1, and 2.5, respectively.