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Design and Evaluation of a NIC-Driven Host-Independent Network System  

Yim Keun Soo (서울대학교 컴퓨터공학부)
Cha Hojung (연세대학교 컴퓨터산업공학부)
Koh Kern (서울대학교 컴퓨터공학부)
Publication Information
Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory / v.31, no.11, 2004 , pp. 626-634 More about this Journal
Abstract
In a client-server model, network server systems suffer from both heavy communication and computational loads. While communication channels become increasingly speedy, the existing protocol stack architectures still include mainly three performance bottlenecks of protocol stack processing, system call, and network interrupt overheads. To address these obstacles, in this paper we present a host-independent network system where a network interface card (NIC) is utilized in an efficient manner. First, by offloading network-related portion to the NIC, the host can fully utilize its processing power for other useful purposes. Second, it eliminates the system call overhead, such as context-switching and memory copy operations, since the host communicates with the NIC through its user-level libraries. Third, it a] so reduces the network interrupt operation count as the host handles the interrupt in a segment instead of a packet. The experimental results show that the proposed network system reduces the host CPU overhead for communication system by 68-71%. It also shows that the proposed system improves the communication speed by 11-83% under heavy computational and communication load conditions.
Keywords
High-speed networking; protocol stack architecture; network interface card; host independent;
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