Offloading SCION Packet Forwarding to XDP BPF

Abstract

Existing fixed-function packet processing hardware does not support novel protocols like the next-generation Internet architecture SCION. While SCION routers have previously been accelerated using DPDK and Tofino ASICs, we present an alternative lightweight but feature-complete approach based on the eXpress data path (XDP). We discuss implementation challenges and opportunities unique to the XDP BPF environment and demonstrate a first prototype capable of forwarding at least 0.676 million packets per second per CPU core.